News
The Gist
- AI-Powered Stream unveiled. Sitecore launched Sitecore Stream, introducing AI capabilities for its digital experience platform (DXP).
- Focus on brand-aware AI. Stream leverages AI to maintain brand consistency across marketing efforts.
- Customer reaction. Nestlé has embraced Sitecore Stream for managing thousands of brand documents efficiently.
NASHVILLE — Sitecore today predictably unveiled some artificial intelligence capabilities for its digital customer experience software stack at its annual Sitecore Symposium customer conference here at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in the country music capital of the world.
AI and Nashville? Hey, ChatGPT, write a country song based on our interviews with Sitecore’s CEO and some Sitecore experts about the new Sitecore Stream infusion of AI into the Sitecore DXP and content marketing stack:
(Chorus)
With Sitecore’s Stream, we’re set to fly,
Brand-aware AI takes us sky-high.
From Nestlé to Microsoft, the stories ring true,
With composable power, there’s nothing we can't do.
Sitecore’s Intelligent DXP Vision via Sitecore Stream
Ok, enough of that. Though we are in Nashville. Why not mix up AI and country tunes?
However, beyond the cowboy boots and Johnny Cash vibes, Sitecore wants us to sing and dance to the tune of the “Intelligent DXP” with its new Sitecore Stream offering. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Sitecore Stream aims to orchestrate a marketer experience across Sitecore solutions, including XM Cloud, Content Hub and Experience Platform (XP).
It’s a heckuva vision — Intelligent DXP. Remember, though, digital experience platform itself was a moniker seen as a stretch when it began to take over "CMS" a few years back. Some question it’s more of a marketing label on an old-fashioned content management system.
And, as we reported earlier this month, any experienced enterprise architect or systems integrator can tell you that while the marketers have evolved their nomenclature, many an RFP today still calls these systems "content management systems," and when teams are chatting internally, you can bet they call the system a CMS.
Labels aside, here’s the Sitecore Stream commitment using generative AI:
-
Brand-aware AI: Helps align marketers’ actions, recommendations and experiences with the organization’s brand identity, values and guidelines.
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AI-enhanced workflows: Automates repetitive tasks to accelerate execution and boost collaboration.
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Generative copilots: For brand, brief, content and experience creation and optimization, these help marketers stay on brand.
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Composable product architecture: Enables full interoperability across a brand’s existing martech stack.
“That's really our vision: the digital experience platform, with our investments in composable, we made it a lot smarter in terms of how you could assemble the stack,” Sitecore CEO Dave O’Flanagan said in an interview with CMSWire ahead of the conference. “With our new investments in AI, with Sitecore Stream, we're making it a lot smarter in terms of how marketers can work on the platform.”
Stream’s received a rave review from at least one big brand. Nestlé, the global chocolate brand, has to manage 3,000 brand strategic documents and campaign toolkits. It trained its AI brand assistant with text, images and videos to stay on point for its brand in Sitecore’s Content Hub asset management. Prompt example: “What are our brand colors for Nescafé?”
Aude Gandon, global CMO at Nestlé, told CMSWire exclusively, “Nestlé’s thousands of marketers manage an extensive portfolio across 188 markets and collaborate with numerous agencies. To streamline collaboration, we wanted to bring our brand assets and Strategic Documents into a single, secure place. The new Sitecore Stream solution, created with Sitecore and Microsoft and leveraging the power of GenAI, is greatly facilitating brand and category knowledge within Nestlé and has been embraced by our partners as well. We believe this will offer an enhanced experience to all our users.”
Related Article: Sitecore Officially Names Dave O'Flanagan as CEO
What Are Sitecore's AI Differentiators?
Of course, every DXP and content provider’s pushing AI infusions these days — along with the proverbial clever names born out of many a marketing meeting. Adobe, Optimizely, Acquia… you name it. The ones that appear in the same industry reports as Sitecore.
Where are the Sitecore AI differentiators? Are we talking Carrie Underwood hit records here or Vanilla Ice one-hit wonders? (Editor's note: I can't think of a country one-hit wonder).
Let’s leave this one to the experts, the integrators working with Sitecore day-to-day.
AI Customizations Boost Security, Policies
Amit Kumar, solution architect at Avanade X UKI, noted Sitecore’s generative AI infusions in products such as Sitecore Content Hub for creating content and Sitecore Search for AI-powered personalized search.
“Many Sitecore Community members released the AI-based module to faster and improve the Sitecore Development process,” Kumar told CMSWire. "Most organizations using GenAI for content, code and images need a lot of time and effort to improve their digital experience. Sitecore might be working to help their customers succeed in digital transformation by developing AI features that let organizations customize models to match their security and policies.”
Bringing Your Own AI Into XM Cloud
Robbert Hock, founder and owner of Kayee, an independent provider of Sitecore development, said besides AI integration in Content Hub, he hopes Sitecore will quickly integrate AI — through the option of either providers/plugins, and added to that being able to bring your own AI into Sitecore XM Cloud.
This, he said, would speed up content creation, image generation and auto translating content in various languages. He’d also like to see the company speed up creating experiences in Sitecore Personalize and use AI for advanced A/B testing of content and experiences.
Blending AI With Marketing Workflows
Tim Marsh, co-head, CMS/DXP practice for DEP EMEA at EPAM Systems, said monolith products in this space normally had too many features that customers didn't need.
MACH — microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless — tried to correct that by customers taking the separate products for their needs. “However,” Marsh added, “this presented a new problem with orchestration, as products can work together but it's a fine art.”
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Sitecore has identified that as a critical problem and is looking for that seamless experience but with composable products.
“The customer is what is important here, and by using AI to be aware of the brand, tone or voice and other aspects enables it to work cross product and capability,” Marsh said. “For me Sitecore is blending AI with marketing workflows to optimize digital experience management while ensuring brand consistency and ethical AI usage. Not just bolting on a feature or buying another company to fulfill a need, they are setting a foundational orchestration layer to help customers succeed.”
Related Article: Navigating the Evolution: From CMS to DXP in the Digital Age
Sitecore's Financial Momentum: $500 Million ARR
Of course, software in this space goes beyond AI. Sitecore is doing something right if you look at financials as the ultimate measuring stick — Sitecore hauled in a half-billion in ARR in the 2024 fiscal year. Its composable, fully SaaS DXP, XM Cloud, the foundation for Sitecore's DXP, is the fastest-growing solution in the company's history, and the company boasts about its 3,000 customers.
Looking at raw software, though, Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms earlier this year cited Sitecore’s strength and weaknesses:
Gartner found Sitecore's strengths are its extensive application marketplace with over 1,000 integrations, no-code tools and cloud-native products like XM Cloud, Discover and Personalize, which offer scalability, stability and ease of use. Its weaknesses are concerns over a potential sale by its owner EQT, customer hesitancy to adopt the XM Cloud due to higher costs and migration challenges, and confusion around its overlapping product suite post-acquisitions.
But XM Cloud's now growing in sales in "enormous" fashion, O'Flanagan told CMSWire. Its fully SaaS headless content management system XM Cloud allows the company to provide “very agile digital experiences to organizations big and small, including healthcare providers.”
"The other big message that we wanted to stress to the market is that we're in quite a unique position to offer choice to our customers, where some of our customers may still want to host on-premise, some might want to host as a managed cloud offering or some might want to go to full SaaS, and we've got that breadth of offering,” O’Flanagan said.
Sitecore sees “enormous growth” in SaaS offerings, the majority of its growth, in fact. It’s also seeing steady growth in managed cloud and subscription services, with new opportunities emerging in different regions. Many existing customers using subscription products on-premises or in managed cloud environments are expanding their usage across more areas, increasing both the scope and number of users.
“So it's a combination of both,” O’Flanagan told CMSWire. “But I think from our perspective, we can see huge traction and growth from a cloud perspective, specifically XM Cloud.”
The Ideal Sitecore Product Roadmap
David San Filippo, senior vice president, Digital Content & Experience for Altudo, said some of his ideal product portfolio from Sitecore would include:
- Innovation with XM Cloud. The flagship, SaaS model with consistent innovation and continued investment. Think XMC is ahead of the curve market-wise in terms of architecture and capabilities? While competitors have started to move to headless and modern architecture, they are behind Sitecore in their approaches.
- Sitecore XM (Experience Manager) and options. Supporting on-premise, managed cloud topologies. Enable Sitecore Pages, Components and Forms as an optional SaaS service management layer with optional Experience Edge Publishing Target to bring architecture/capabilities into alignment.
- Sustaining support for XP (Experience Platform) until it can retire. xDB vs. CDP/Personalize are not aligned. Email Experience Manager (EXM) and Federated Experience Manager (FXM) aren't best of breed tools. Existing XP marketing stack was poorly adopted, and confusion will continue with messaging with overlap in capabilities. 10.4 Adding Experience Database (xDB) capabilities is a mixed signal. “Think this is the biggest weakness,” San Filippo said. “They have too many existing customers on XP that they don't want to alienate (and made that mistake before, earlier in the XMC release cycle), so I'm not sure how they pivot without further damage to their user base.”
- Combine CDP and Personalize to just Personalize. CDP is needed to drive data scenarios in Personalize, and CDP isn't being adopted on its own. Customers won't replace their CDP with Sitecore CDP. So eliminate the confusion and bring them together.
“Directionally, I liked that they consolidated their messaging around their platform around what customer's do with their platform,” he added, “moving away from presenting their products as a series of clouds.”
