Before the food feast of Thanksgiving, we spent last week feasting on marketing content at Optimizely’s Opticon 24 conference in San Antonio. Hundreds of marketers came to the JW Marriott to discuss digital optimization, AI, commerce, and more customer-experience hot-button topics.
Like many other MarTech conferences, AI was the hot topic. Whether talking about customer insights or content creation, there was no doubt AI is here to stay. What was different about the conversations at Opticon was that regardless of how exciting AI or other technologies may be, one thing everyone agreed on was that the human touch remains a critical part of marketing and the customer experience.
With that in mind, we asked our team to share what resonated with them most from our first appearance at Opticon.
You’re going to hear this a lot, but marketers right now are trying to determine how to do more with less, and that was definitely the case at Opticon. But there was also a sense of positivity heading into a new year.
Experimentation and pure CMS capabilities were top of mind all around, but commerce still feels like an area of growth. Overall, the challenge is around how to help companies benefit from the entirety of the Optimizely One platform and expand existing clients’ knowledge in regards to the breadth of Optimzely’s products.
Jim and others will talk about Opal AI – and it was a significant announcement – but not to be overlooked is the other news coming out of Opticon that Optimizely is now HIPPA compliant. This will open a full healthcare vertical and help Optimizely stand out in that space as a competitor to Sitecore and others.
The big news coming out of Opticon was the expanded partnership with Google Gemini. Optimizely One will now use Google’s Gemini models through its AI assistant Opal. As part of the announcement, Optimizely also launched new AI agents powered by these Gemini.
These aren’t your standard Q&A chatbots. The purpose is to create and take actions on tasks across Optimizely One workflows. We heard the rallying cry all week of “Make the lives of marketers better” and this is one way that can happen.
Other areas that stood out were SaaS CMS (and giving a choice between SaaS and PaaS) and its growing features and integrations, and personalization as a standalone offering that is adjacent to experimentation. Finally, Optimizely has big plans for its recent acquisition of analytics platform Netspring. The company is being integrated quickly and will focus on data consistency and the ability to use the non-visible metrics through business-outcome attribution instead of the typical click/scroll/etc. data.
My biggest takeaway is around value realization. Like most tech ecosystems right now, customers want to get more out of what they already have, or even just need to better understand what they have and understand how to use it all. There’s a clear focus from Optimizely on a pure CMS play, which makes a tone of sense. But we also heard tons of ways in which it is expanding across platforms, industries, etc.
Strategy is a huge focus as budgets remain tight. Marketers are trying to find ways to plan, organize, and execute more efficiently while getting a better understanding of what they have and what’s working. And we, as partners, are finding ways to help them understand their current states, what’s possible, and where to start.
Learn more about our Optimizely services and download our co-branded ebook to start streamlining your digital experiences.
