Composed is the new composable: How Sitecore has planted agentic AI at the heart of its SaaS solution

Sitecore Symposium is always an exciting week of big announcements, product releases, and pivotal shifts in Sitecore's goals and trajectory. But last week's Sitecore Symposium in Orlando was not just another debut of a sexy new tool. The announcement of SitecoreAI introduced a completely different way of working that positions AI as central to your workflow rather than adjacent to it - which feels like a natural evolution as the agentic marketing capabilities have improved by leaps and bounds in such a short span.

Instead of focusing on products and functions, SitecoreAI puts the focus back on the core user journeys of digital marketers, content creators and authors, analysts, and other core team members. It prioritizes the jobs-to-be-done and makes that workflow far more seamless. From audiences & insights to content planning to content delivery and optimization, AI agents assist with research, ideating, content creation, automating complex workflows, running experiments, and suggesting next steps.

Is this the return of the monolith?

Yes and no. It was only last year that we were still celebrating the "composable" nature of the new SaaS platform, allowing customers to connect best-in-breed tools they need. Composability makes a lot of sense, after all. But the end result was a siloed experience where managing your digital spaces meant opening a fistful of tabs for elements of XM Cloud like the portal launch pad and site collections plus products like Stream, CDP & Personalize, Content Hub, and Search.

The revamped UI for SitecoreAI ties together nicely the needs of the user with the different functions of the platform without battering you with product names and different navigation paradigms. Sitecore's simultaneous announcement that most product functions we know today would all be available for customers to try and pay for only what they use (licensing simplified to one metric per capability), this iteration of Sitecore unlocks its full power without the hassle of new product pricing and procurement. It's all there. This feels composed, not monolithic in the sense that you buy the whole farm and don't get the full value out of your investment. And for those worried about customization and scalability, Sitecore has launched a SaaS-compatible marketplace of apps to choose from which will continue to grow rapidly.

5 exciting ways AI agents will help speed your workflows

1. Brand-aware agency - The AI assistant is always there at every step to ingest your brand materials and context, help you understand your audience, develop campaign briefs, suggest tasks, craft and optimize content, set up A/B tests, and suggest ABM personalization tactics.
2. Component-level personalization - SitecoreAI includes the ability in Design Studio to ingest an existing component in your solution onto a canvas, experiment on new variants with AI, save and operationalize that variant all without tapping development resources. 
3. Built-in and custom agents - Sitecore AI comes out-of-the-box with several common use cases like researcher, translator, blog writer, bulk content generator, account data enricher, competitor analyzer, email writer, and many more. You can also roll your own agents tailored to specific workflows for, say, auto-tagging new content with your business taxonomy.
4. Multi-agent flows and collaboration spaces - Flows is a canvas for building and connecting agents into multitasking workflows using drag-and-drop tools. Since marketing is a team sport, Spaces is a place for teams to manage, track, and collaborate on all agent and flow activity in real time. These are your real co-pilots.
5. AI-triggered suggestions - Imagine your solution is smart enough to tell you where the gaps are. Signals will surface trends, insights, and suggests actions and next steps to guide smarter marketing actions.

Driven by the agentic marketing revolution underway in the market, the SitecoreAI experience is already superior to XM Cloud and its add-ons and positions Sitecore as a leader in this space. Look for the platform to continue to gel and strengthen its capabilities as the pool of sophisticated agents grows.

If you are an existing Sitecore XM Cloud customer and woke up Monday morning to a EULA and completely redesigned solution, wondering what to make of it, fear not. Velir has got your back. Reach out to find out how we can make sure you are maximizing your investment with Sitecore.