News
The Gist
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AI agent library. Optimizely adds specialized, customizable AI agents for marketing tasks.
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Workflow automation. New drag-and-drop tools enable no-code orchestration and integration.
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Marketer impact. Marketing teams gain faster AI deployment, improved efficiency and easier integration.
Optimizely announced new agentic capabilities for its AI offering, Optimizely Opal, at its annual Opticon event in New York City on September 10, 2025. The enhancements include a library of specialized AI agents, custom agent building capabilities and a drag-and-drop interface for workflow orchestration.
According to company officials, the new features aim to help marketing and digital teams deploy AI at scale by connecting seamlessly with existing data and tools. The company also recently introduced what it describes as the industry's first GEO-ready CMS, designed to improve content visibility in AI-powered search environments.
Table of Contents
- Impacted Audiences for Optimizely Opal
- AI Reshaping Digital Experience Platforms
- AI: From Hype to Business Benefit
- Opal Capabilities Breakdown
- Optimizely's Standalone AI Integration Platform Strategy
- From Efficiency Gains to Autonomy
- Optimizely Background
Impacted Audiences for Optimizely Opal
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Marketing and digital teams seeking AI automation
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Enterprise brands optimizing digital experiences
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Content creators adapting to AI-powered search
AI Reshaping Digital Experience Platforms
AI in digital experience platforms has evolved from basic content generation to orchestrating entire marketing workflows, with agentic capabilities becoming the new competitive battleground.
Optimizely, originally founded as Episerver in 1994, rebranded after acquiring the original Optimizely in 2020. The company has positioned itself at the intersection of AI, experimentation and content management, according to company officials.
Marketing teams face increasing pressure to do more with less as search behaviors shift dramatically - with zero-click searches reducing website traffic and privacy regulations limiting data collection. This has accelerated adoption of AI tools that can automate routine tasks while enabling strategic work.
Leading DXPs are embedding AI directly into core workflows, with platforms like Optimizely's Opal applying machine learning to experimentation at scale. These tools aim to close the gap between data and action, according to industry reports, giving marketing teams the ability to automatically translate insights into changes without increasing workflow friction.
AI: From Hype to Business Benefit
"We know the world of AI is overwhelming, so we've taken on the responsibility to truly understand our customers' challenges and embed AI across our entire platform to move from hype to business benefit." — Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely
Opal Capabilities Breakdown
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Specialized Agents | Library of AI agents for marketing tasks across content and analytics. |
| Custom Agent Building | Users can create agents with their own data and instructions. |
| Workflow Orchestration | No-code, drag-and-drop interface for sequencing AI agents. |
| Extensible Integrations | Connects with third-party tools and data sources. |
| Slack Integration | Access to Opal directly through Slack conversations. |
| Pre-built Workflows | Ready-to-use templates customizable to business needs. |
| GEO-ready CMS | Tools for optimization in AI-powered search environments. |
Optimizely's Standalone AI Integration Platform Strategy
Kevin Li, SVP of product at Optimizely, emphasized in an interview with CMSWire that Opal is not just an AI add-on but a fully independent platform. “We want companies to build agents and orchestrate agents and there's a lot of agent washing going on in the market. So that's really important,” Li said.
He added that launching Opal as a standalone solution on top of Optimizely’s DXP was a deliberate move: “We've literally built an AI native solution that competes in fundamentally ... you can almost think about it as a different category in and of itself. So that's a big differentiator."
Shafqat Islam, Optimizely’s CMO, reinforced the investment behind this strategy.
“We have an entire Opal platform team of 30–40 engineers, product people and designers who are just building that standalone platform,” he explained to CMSWire. While this approach requires significant resources, Islam said it enables faster use cases, partner extensibility and long-term differentiation compared to embedding AI features piecemeal across products.
Related Article: Optimizely Uprades Opal to Deliver Agentic AI for Marketing Teams
From Efficiency Gains to Autonomy
Li argued that embedding AI as a feature inside CMS or experimentation tools would only deliver incremental benefits.
“If all business is trying to do is to get like a 50% increase in efficiency, 30% increase in efficiency ... it would be faster and cheaper and easier for us to just add features inside of our CMS, features inside of our experimentation (platform),” he said. “But that's not what we're after. We're after 20X improvements. We need autonomous processes to run.”
Islam illustrated how this autonomy might look in practice.
“Imagine a workflow, an agent workflow, that runs autonomously every day or every week that can look at the goal that you have set, comes up with test ideas, builds two or three of these experiments, run them pick the winner and push that to production,” he said. That’s a six or seven step workflow, he added, that Opal can run autonomously versus a marketer manually pushing buttons. The same applies to CMS tasks: automatically checking accessibility across all pages and pushing updates live.
Related Article: Optimizely's DXP Roadmap: AI Integration, Vertical Focus, SaaS CMS
Optimizely Background
Optimizely targets digital marketing and technology leaders at mid-sized to large enterprises. The company, operating under the Optimizely brand since Episerver's 1994 founding in Sweden, delivers digital experience solutions.
Platform Capabilities
Its platform includes content management, digital commerce, personalization and experimentation tools. The company asserts that its digital experience platform (DXP) enables organizations to manage, test and optimize digital content and customer journeys. Key features include A/B testing, web content management and integration with marketing automation systems.
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Market Position
The company is positioned as a significant provider in the digital experience and experimentation software market. It primarily serves enterprise and upper mid-market organizations across industries such as retail, financial services and manufacturing. Typical customers are digital, marketing and technology teams seeking to improve customer engagement and conversion through data-driven experimentation and content strategies.
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