Smarter DXPs: What Real AI Innovation Looks Like

The Gist

AI in DXPs must prove itself. Generative and predictive capabilities are now baked into enterprise DXPs, but digital leaders should push beyond the hype to demand business impact.
Success is measured in outcomes. Revenue lift, experimentation velocity, and strategic enablement — not shiny features — are the real benchmarks of AI performance in digital experience platforms.
Enablement, not complexity. The next evolution of AI in DX is about automation with purpose — turning insight into action without increasing team burden or workflow friction.

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are making big promises with AI — promises that sound transformative on paper. But what do they actually deliver for digital and marketing leaders under pressure to drive measurable impact while consumer expectations continue to race ahead of the tools built to meet them?

Shifting Search Behaviors Challenge Digital Strategy

What makes the landscape more challenging is that search behaviors are shifting dramatically: zero-click searches mean fewer visitors ever reach your owned content, while walled gardens and stricter privacy regulations make valuable audience insights and data points harder to capture, connect and act on. For marketers, the increasing darkening of the funnel raises the stakes for every single interaction that can be influenced or is owned.

AI Capabilities Are Becoming Table Stakes

In response, we've seen AI increasingly woven into the core of enterprise DXPs; For example, Sitecore’s AI-powered personalization and content recommendations, Optimizely’s Opal applying machine learning to experimentation at scale, and, notably, the open-source community pushing forward too with Velir’s own Kevin Quillen helping to advance AI in Drupal with a new module that inserted generative capabilities directly into the CMS. (Editor's note: the author's company is Velir).

These are exciting advancements as they help brands automate repetitive tasks, test and learn faster and close the loop between what audiences want and what we deliver. But the question every digital leader should be asking is: how much further can — and should — this innovation go?

Beyond Buzzwords: AI That Drives Business Outcomes
The Real Innovation: AI as an Enablement Engine
What’s Next for AI in Digital Experience

Beyond Buzzwords: AI That Drives Business Outcomes

The digital experience industry has no shortage of bold claims about AI that “transforms experiences.” But the true measure of AI’s value is whether it makes marketing leaders more effective at moving the needle: faster content delivery, higher experimentation velocity clearer ROI attribution and the freedom to focus on strategic growth instead of content wrangling and manual optimizations.

A recent McKinsey report found that 63% of companies that have embedded AI into their marketing and sales processes have seen at least a 5% revenue uplift — with some achieving 20% or more when personalization is scaled properly (McKinsey, The State of AI ).

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that by the end of this year, organizations that operationalize AI across their marketing programs will outperform peers by 25% in customer experience metrics (Gartner, Predicts 2024: AI in Marketing).

Platforms Are Embedding Intelligence Into Daily Operations

Tools like Sitecore AI and Optimizely Opal point the way forward. They’re not just shiny add-ons; they’re building intelligence into the day-to-day operations of content, commerce and customer journeys.

Acquia DAM is using AI-driven tagging and metadata generation to help teams organize massive libraries of creative assets. This means faster discovery, less time wasted searching, and greater brand consistency when assets are reused across channels.

Sitecore AI, through its new strategic partnership with Gradial, is making real-time personalization more actionable by integrating dynamic content testing with advanced customer data modeling — helping marketers deliver tailored experiences at scale, with proven use cases like dynamically adapting product offers based on live behavioral signals

Optimizely Opal 2 is giving teams the power to spin up experiments and deploy content variations in minutes, using machine learning to predict which experiences will perform best — so optimization becomes continuous, not a one-off effort.

When done right, DXP-integrated AI turns every interaction into a learning moment — so brands can adapt in real time and compete in a landscape where agility beats size.

AI Capabilities in Leading DX Platforms

Top digital experience platforms are embedding AI directly into core workflows to streamline content delivery, personalize experiences, and accelerate optimization. The table below highlights key AI features and their business impact across major players in the DXP space.

Platform	AI Capability	Business Impact
Sitecore	Real-time personalization via behavioral data and dynamic content testing	Tailors experiences at scale; improves conversion rates and engagement
Optimizely (Opal)	ML-driven experimentation and predictive content performance	Speeds up testing cycles and boosts content effectiveness
Acquia DAM	AI-powered tagging and metadata generation	Enhances asset discoverability and brand consistency

The Real Innovation: AI as an Enablement Engine

The Next Frontier: Closing the Data-to-Action Gap

True AI innovation goes beyond what the end user sees; it’s about giving every team the ability to act on data, faster and smarter. The next frontier is AI that closes the gap between data and action. Innovation means giving marketing and digital teams not just insights, but the power to automatically translate those insights into changes — a headline tweak, a product recommendation, a segment reallocation — all tested and validated before the competition even notices.

It’s no wonder that a 2023 Salesforce survey showed that 68% of marketers believe generative AI will help them serve their customers better (Salesforce, Generative AI Snapshot Research, 2023). That’s not just potential — it’s an operational reality for organizations that implement AI thoughtfully.

And that’s where the real upside lives. AI that doesn’t just tell you what to do, but does it for you — responsibly, transparently and in line with your brand’s goals. This is what separates the DX platforms that keep up from the ones that lead.

What’s Next for AI in Digital Experience

AI as a Quiet Accelerator in a Noisy Market

Innovation in AI shouldn’t add complexity; ideally it’s simplifying tasks, processes and our day-to-day work. The true next step is making AI a practical enablement engine — a force multiplier that gives digital and marketing leaders the confidence their platforms are always working for them, quietly accelerating how they create, test and evolve in an unpredictable market.

For teams and organizations managing millions of customer touchpoints and tight budgets, the promise of AI in DXPs is straightforward: help teams do more of what works, faster, with less guesswork and greater certainty. As platforms like Sitecore, Optimizely, Drupal and others continue to embed AI deeper into their core, the organizations that embrace this shift thoughtfully — not just as a trend but as an operating advantage — will be the ones that lead.

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