Opticon 2025 and Key AI Takeaways

Full Disclosure

The 2025 Opticon in New York City was not my first Optimizely event, sort of. I went to Episerver Ascend pre-pandemic, erm… somewhere, and thankfully absolutely nothing has changed at all. Thanks for reading…

Fine. A lot has changed, and the world of digital marketing has been on an exciting multi-hype-cycle-and-acquisition journey that leaves most of us constantly asking for the latest acronym dictionary. While I may not be a frequent participant at this particular event, I was very excited to join this year.

I am not new to this space. Since my LinkedIn profile is readily available, I might as well be upfront. I am a lifelong Sitecore strategist. In fact, I am a seven-time Sitecore Strategy MVP and worked at corporate for three years with a dedicated YouTube channel. So to paraphrase poet laureate Gordy Sumner for this recent conference, “I’m a Sitecorian in New York.” Like any traveler, that gave me useful perspective. Perspective I want to share in 1500 words or less.

Opticon 2025 – The Event

The event itself was well organized and held in a very walkable section of the Javits Center in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. It was one day. From the opening keynotes through the post-conference dance club vibe, it all flowed together. I loved the pace and was energized by the constant movement: main room, partner floor, session room, partner floor lunch, session, happy hour, closing, party, sleep. Velir also hosted an exclusive partner session led by OMVP Kevin Schofield, but for all intents and purposes, Opticon25 was a one-day conference. I can get behind that. Now, with some time passed, I can honestly say I got everything I needed and expected from a compact event. Save your budgets, software friends.

I also expected to feel like a stranger in a strange land. I was wrong. The new friends from Optimizely were welcoming even before they knew my professional journey, and that included a thoughtful conversation about CMS with VP of Product, Nazanin Ramezani and generous time from CEO, Alex Atzberger. But just as striking were the old friends. The partner booth floor could have been any leading enterprise DXP conference. The friendly faces and long-standing relationships were everywhere. It felt like a reunion filled with gossip, side-eyed conversations, and politicking that only this community of technology and strategy partners can deliver in one 15,000-square-foot room.

This fact matters. The bulk of these partners focus on the same three or four digital marketing solutions. That is an advantage to product owners. While most platforms pitch their full suite and better-together stories, they can also integrate and complement each other to create solutions as unique as a business itself. As a former product owner, I believed that if you bought a full suite from one provider, you innovated at the speed of their releases. That was especially true before SaaS. Now, composability allows organizations to stitch together the pieces they need to innovate at the pace of their business. Common partners across platforms bring vision, strategy, and the skills to connect the pieces and scale them over time.

The Major Theme – Hint: It’s AI

Hey you, under that rock! Have you heard of AI, agentic workflows, or GEO? Like everything else in technology and digital marketing, it was all anyone could talk about at Opticon25.

Before I left Sitecore corporate, I was fluid in Stream but had and less exposure to Opal, Optimizely’s AI engine. Heading into this event, I was still quoting Gordo in my head: “I don’t take Opal, I drink Stream, my dear… I’m a Sitecorian in New York.” That being said (sung), I was the one under the rock. Opal is impressive, and I would put this agentic solution ahead of other tools I have seen and worked with.

What stood out was not hype, but integration. In one session, Naz demonstrated how Opal could complete a CMS page with both SEO and GEO optimization in seconds. Optimizely’s own benchmark report confirms what I saw: customers using Opal are increasing content creation output, cutting time per task, and improving experiment win rates.

Still, Optimizely did not suggest that adoption is instant. In the “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly” session, they laid out a pragmatic maturity model. Crawl with manageable tools and small wins. Walk by embedding AI into workflows and habits. Run by letting agents work more autonomously. Fly by building a culture where orchestration is scaled across the enterprise.

For most organizations, crawl is not an insult, it is reality. Only 25 percent of companies report having a fully implemented AI governance program, and research shows more than half of AI-generated content has significant issues. Opticon25 struck the right balance of vision and realism. The takeaway for decision makers is simple: do not race to fly. Build confidence, measure wins, and grow adoption at a pace that sticks.

Data at the Center of Everything

If there is one thing Opticon25 reinforced for me, it is that AI is only as strong as the data foundation beneath it. The Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly maturity model sounds great on stage, but in practice you cannot progress beyond crawl unless your house is in order.

Building that foundation takes time, but it is the difference between stalling at pilots and unlocking enterprise-level ROI. Consent and privacy must be non-negotiable. Signals need to be clean, structured, and unified if they are going to fuel intelligent agents. And without confident identity resolution, you are not optimizing against a real customer journey, you are chasing noise. The real prize is a Customer 360 view, where every system (content, commerce, CRM, analytics) feeds into one profile so agents act with full context.

And yet, this is where most organizations stumble. Pilots get stuck in silos. Internally built agents underperform. Research from MIT and Google shows they deliver about 50 percent lower ROI than vendor-supported solutions because governance and integration are not there. Proof-of-concepts launch without KPIs and die in purgatory. Governance gets bolted on after the fact, eroding trust and slowing scale.

Summary

Looking back on Opticon25, I left New York with more than just notes from a well-run one-day conference. I left with a clear sense that the role of the website is shifting again. This time the conversation is about data, agentic AI, and how marketing teams will adapt to a new foundation for growth.

Opal was at the center of the event, and rightly so. The demos showed that AI is moving from a set of productivity tricks to the orchestrator of workflows, experiments, and personalization. The Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly framework reminded me that adoption is not instant. Most organizations are still crawling. And that is okay, because even small wins build the literacy and momentum needed to scale.

What makes or breaks that journey is data. Without governance, identity resolution, and clear KPIs, most pilots never escape proof-of-concept purgatory. With the right foundation, AI agents can finally act with context and deliver real ROI. This is where Velir and Brooklyn Data bring something unique. We combine decades of experience in digital strategy with deep data engineering expertise. That mix is what helps organizations move past pilots and into enterprise scale with confidence.

So where does this leave us? For me, Opticon25 was a reminder that the website is not standing still. It is becoming the place where data and AI converge to shape adaptive, predictive, and personal experiences. That future is coming quickly, and it will be on display at upcoming events like Sitecore Symposium. The real question is not whether AI will redefine digital marketing. It is whether your organization is ready to take the next step.