AI is the New UI: Sitecore User Group Conference 2025

SUGCON 2025 brought a fresh new vision for Sitecore that's AI-centered. Gone are the days when the Content Editor is king. Sitecore Stream as a brand is synonymous with Sitecore's generative AI system. However, Sitecore’s premium offering can streamline your marketing efforts with XM Cloud Hub. Sitecore’s new focus is managing marketing projects (websites, campaigns, emails, and more) from within Stream’s workflow and orchestrating its efforts across all your separate marketing systems, all with your brand in mind.

Agentic Workflows

The grandest vision for working with Stream starts with the Agentic Workflows. This JIRA-like project management tool considers your marketing goals as the center of your operations. It uses a network of tools with AI integrations to help make all the individual tasks easier. Chat PRD (AI for Product Managers) is still upcoming, but will help streamline communication and project management, ensuring that marketing goals are clearly defined and met.

Copilot Integrations

Sitecore has already integrated AI into many of its products and intends to continue expanding. Many of the interfaces are chat-based, but not all are. Here’s what they’ve done so far.

Brand Copilot (Premium Stream)

Sitecore’s “Brand Assistant” helps marketers create on-brand content, do market research, and generate campaign directions that provide goals, audiences, objectives, and key messages. The Brand Assistant can be found in the XM cloud portal under the Stream menu. When you ask questions, it uses the brand knowledge you’ve provided as context to generate brand-aligned content. This helps maintain consistency, authenticity, differentiation, and control of your brand’s story.

AI Integration in Sitecore Experience Platform (XP)

Sitecore hasn’t forgotten the XP system users. They provide a free tier of Stream for XP users that includes AI-assisted content generation. This will allow you to try before you buy and learn how to integrate AI into your daily work. Sitecore Stream is supported in XM and XP systems 10.2+. To get started with AI in Sitecore XP, contact your account manager for a license, and visit Get AI in XP for detailed setup instructions. Or you can get some support from Velir!

AI in XM Cloud

XM Cloud is going to be one of the prime beneficiaries in the long run. It’s the main webpage workbench, and many of the AI features will be embedded throughout the interface to make everyday tasks easier, like helping you optimize content with A/B/n tests and generate personalized content for your audience.

AI in Content Hub

Content Hub, Sitecore’s Digital Asset Management platform, already released AI-assisted visual search last year, but now it can generate/refine content, translate content, and tag images.

AI in Sitecore CDP

Gensights is an AI-driven dashboard that analyzes trends, user behavior, and performance metrics from Sitecore CDP. It transforms data into clear summaries to help teams quickly identify the most relevant insights. It has not yet been discussed whether generating specific reports will be extensible.

AI in Sitecore Search

Questions and Answers is a feature that enables customers to ask natural language questions and get generated responses sourced from your content collection and Sitecore Search domain. This is one of the few customer-facing AI features, but I wouldn’t expect it to be the last.

Upcoming Sitecore Features

Here are some of the upcoming Sitecore features revealed at this year’s SUGCON.

New Copilot Capabilities

Over time, Sitecore has indicated they’re planning additional AI capabilities for their Copilots in their roadmap that include:

• Deep Search
• Semantic Search
• Content Explorer
• Component Generation
• A/B Generation
• Experiment Generation

Generative Experience Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a cutting-edge content marketing strategy designed to improve the performance of your digital content within Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, LLAMA, Gemini, and Mistral. Unlike SEO, which improves rankings in search engine results with keywords and backlinks, GEO optimizes content to resonate with user queries. Sitecore intends to build support for marketers to geo-optimize their content.

Developer Experience

Developers are now leveraging new AI tools to work more effectively and enable more valuable website capabilities. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows developers to use more complex tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot to set up their environments and scaffold sites quickly. This will also allow them to automate many daily tasks, like running builds, committing code, and communicating with teams in Slack by asking AI to do it for them.

Marketplace

The marketplace is where custom modules can be built by anyone and released for a specific customer or for everyone. You’ll be able to integrate with external systems, including your AI tools, to provide authors with all types of new capabilities. You could even run agentic workflows that reach outside and perform complex accessibility reviews on content or recommend additional components for the page.

Microsoft Data Governance

Although not directly an AI capability, Microsoft came to SUGCON to introduce Purview, which will provide governance, security, and management tools for deploying Copilot models in your region, fine-tuning with your own data, or doing data science.

Implement Sitecore’s AI Advancements with Velir

You and your brand don’t need to navigate these AI advances from SUGCON alone. Velir is a Sitecore Platinum Partner with a proven track record, including 15 years of expertise, 38 certified specialists, and more. We empower brands to unlock Sitecore’s full potential, crafting dynamic, personalized digital experiences that drive real results.

With Sitecore leaning hard into AI and discovering how many new ways authors and visitors can benefit, everyone is a winner. Building and managing effective marketing solutions has never been more promising, and the future has never looked so automated.

Excited to leverage Sitecore’s latest advances in AI? Reach out. Our Sitecore MVPs and experts would be happy to help you.