Editorial
The Gist
- Agentic AI takes center stage. Optimizely positioned Opal as both a toolset and orchestration hub to unify disconnected marketing workflows.
- Scaling personalization and experimentation. Adoption breadth and repeatability surfaced as the real drivers of AI impact for marketing teams.
- Consumer search is shifting fast. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is rising, with early tools to see how AI crawlers interpret your site.
- The human element remains key. Better marketer experience and change management are essential to deliver great digital customer experiences.
NEW YORK CITY — In the last year, AI in marketing has come a long way. Beyond often disconnected tools, the future appears to be agentic, and this year’s Optimizely Opticon had plenty to offer in this way.
It all took place on Sept. 10 at Javits Center in New York City as customers and partners shared stories and talked together about how reaching customers and doing the work of marketing is changing.
There were also some big product announcements centered around agentic AI, and compelling case studies from customers. Let’s explore some of the key takeaways from Opticon25.
Table of Contents
- AI’s Evolving Role in Marketing
- AI as a Tool, Not the Strategy
- Personalization and Experimentation at Scale
- Experimentation as a Growth Mindset
- Scaling AI-Enabled Marketing Teams
- Consumers’ Increasing Use of AI
- A Summary: What It All Means for Marketers
AI’s Evolving Role in Marketing
As you might expect, there was a strong focus on the evolving and growing role of AI in the daily lives of marketers, as well as how those changes can affect end customers.
That said, there was some helpful context provided in the morning sessions.
AI as a Tool, Not the Strategy
Tatyana Zlotsky, CEO of A Place for Mom, reminded the audience that “AI isn’t a strategy; it is a tool to help us win and to provide better services.”
Optimizely’s stance appears to be to move beyond many platforms’ approach of adding AI features and enabling the platforms’ AI—named Opal— as an entrance to the different components of their platform, OptimizelyOne, and as an interface to enable marketers to both create and deliver content and experiences, as well as to test and learn from those experiments, across a myriad of platforms and data sources. Opal’s capabilities have been expanded across their toolset and integrated into everything from their CMS to experimentation tools and more.
Personalization and Experimentation at Scale
Scaling personalization to meet the needs of unique customers and fast-changing opportunities is critical, and can be a compelling component of AI adoption. Yet, tools that marketers have been using are often disconnected from one another, causing copying and pasting at best, and misaligned approaches or missed opportunities at worst.
In his opening remarks, Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger put it this way: “To create a great digital customer experience, you need to create a great marketer experience”
Focusing on AI to make marketers’ jobs easier seems to be paying off. According to Optimizely, Opal has been its fastest-growing product launch with over 10,000 Opal actions performed per day across hundreds of customers.
After all, while performing the tactics themselves is important, finding repeatable and scalable methods to do so is critical to long-term success.
Experimentation as a Growth Mindset
Onstage, Paul Cousineau from Capital One was speaking about their testing and experimentation approach, saying, “The key metric of experimentation internally is breadth of adoption.”
This is where AI adoption resembles the human-focused part of change management more than a solely tech-related transformation.
Related Article: Customer Data Management in 2025: AI's Role in Personalization, Prediction and Trust
Scaling AI-Enabled Marketing Teams
Yet, moving quickly without a clear direction, and orchestration between efforts, won’t add up to the big ROI goals that executive stakeholders have from AI investments. Or, as Optimizely Chief Product Officer Rupali Jain said, “agility without direction is chaos.”
In one example demonstrated on the mainstage, a previously complex task such as creating a website that is on-brand, integrated with the existing martech stack, and experimentation-ready can be created and launched as easy as chatting with your LLM of choice. In practice, this works like a combination of chatting with Opal to make visual and functional changes, as well as making visual editing tools much easier.
This includes the ability to chat with Opal to make layout changes, with the onstage demo showing how a new site can be created an launched in a matter of minutes or hours which might have traditionally taken weeks or even months.
Scalability through AI is also where Optimizely’s arguably most strategic move comes in. Beyond enabling a ChatGPT-like interface within Optimizely tools, Opal is now a standalone AI agent orchestration platform, capable of supporting both a set of out-of-the-box agents, as well as enabling customers and partners to build their own agents that can connect and interact with just about any tool in the martech stack.
This has the potential to take platform to platform integration time down from weeks or months to hours, and positions Optimizely as a connector and orchestrator within a brand’s tech stack.
Related Article: AI at the Crossroads: Creativity, Ethics and Integration Challenges
Consumers’ Increasing Use of AI
It isn’t just marketers that are increasingly using AI. Consumers are searching more with tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT and less with Google than ever before. With search engine optimization being front and center for so many years, these rapid changes in how consumers are searching and finding content online has many brands scrambling.
Thus Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, or one of the many other names it is being referred to, is on the rise. Optimizely has been quick to provide solutions here for website marketers. This includes a partnership with Cloudflare where Optimizely Analytics is able to show how AI crawlers like OpenAI, Anthropic and more are seeing your website.
While we are still in the early stages of understanding what GEO means for websites and digital content, a platform and tools to measure this are a step in the right direction.
Related Article: Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
A Summary: What It All Means for Marketers
Tying it all together are three consistent themes.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
Sep
25
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CX Reality Check: What Your Customers Are Really Thinking
Register now and get the insights you need to not just meet rising expectations, but exceed them.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Content Leaders Collective: What a Good CCMS Actually Looks Like
Discover how content leaders transform clunky systems into growth engines — and why your competitors are ahead.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
First, AI isn't going anywhere. AI is not only here to stay, it is continuing to evolve in complexity, with agentic orchestration soon to be a competitive differentiator between brands that lead and those that lag behind.
Second, content and experiences are still the centerpiece of effective marketing. fter all, as Atzberger said in his opening keynote, “content is the connective tissue” that ties together the customer experience.
And finally, the human component of marketing and marketing operations can’t be ignored, as well as the internal customer experience it creates. The marketing leaders, and the platforms they utilize, that embrace this idea will have the best opportunity for success as this world of marketing and marterch ceaselessly evolves. Opticon25 delivered a lot of promise for marketers looking for some direction on where to look as the profession itself evolves.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
