Unpacking the latest Sitecore product announcement: six key elements

Regular readers of this blog will know that Sitecore continues to invest in its platform. Over the past few years, it has added new features and products, integrated a number of niche acquisitions, made most of its offering available on a SaaS basis, and started to introduce more and more AI features. This is on top of all the usual improvements and tweaks to the suite.  New product enhancements and features are very much business-as-usual.

The latest product announcement from Sitecore is typically bullish and features what it refers to “as more than 250 market-leading innovations”.  In this post we’ll try and unpack the announcement and the major features that are being introduced. Don’t worry, we’re not going to cover all 250 items, just six of the main areas!

1. Expanded AI though Sitecore Stream

Back in October Sitecore announced the launch of Sitecore Stream at its Symposium conference. This is effectively a branding of a bundle of Sitecore’s AI capabilities that are threaded through the product which are based on an integration with Microsoft Azure Open AI services. The new product announcement sees a significant expansion of Stream with added capabilities.

When Stream was launched back in October it had three main focus areas: brand-aware AI, generative copilots and AI-enhanced workflows. In the new product announcement these have been modified to the following: 

• Brand-aware AI which allows teams to set brand guidelines and ensure the generative AI helps reinforce and keep within these standards.
• AI copilots and agents that support different generative processes around content creation, campaign management, content optimisation and more.
• Agentic workflows that can act independently to create sophisticated automation but that can also include humans in the process and workflow where necessary.

Many of the new product features are positioned as part of Sitecore Stream.

Overall, Stream has now been extended across the platform, now being available in the core Sitecore CMS, the Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform) and also the DAM solution. However, perhaps most significant is the addition of the ability to use AI to generate content within the experience platform (XP), a good sign that Sitecore is committed to it’s PaaS offering.  The news that customers with XP 10.2 and above “now have access to the brand-aware AI, copilots, and orchestration capabilities of Sitecore Stream” will be welcomed by many.

2. AI-generated variants

One of the most powerful new AI features is a new content variant generation facility “enabled by Sitecore Stream AI” that helps teams to quickly generate content variants to support personalisation and optimisation which can then also be tested accordingly. The variants can also specifically be used for translation and localisation which could be very useful for global organisations that publish in multiple languages.
Using AI for variant generation has the ability to automate and lower the barriers to using Sitecore for some of the more advanced areas of Sitecore that in practice some teams don’t have the time or headspace to use.  

3. Keeping everything on brand

One of the challenges of using generative AI, particularly across a complex digital footprint with multiple people involved, is to ensure everything remains on brand, particularly as it is so easy to create new content. AI can sometimes produce somewhat generic and characterless content.

The “brand-aware AI” element of Sitecore Stream is potentially so powerful. This can help to ensure the generative AI aligns to a tone of voice, a colour palette, grammar guidelines and more. It also means you can optimise existing content to make it more brand compliant.

The new announcement extends the brand guidelines you can define within the product. This is mainly through the launch of “Brand Kits” where teams can define everything from visual guidelines to specific “dos and don’ts” to detailed tone of voice, and can be applied to an overall brand, or multiple sub-brands. A new smart “Brand Chat” feature also allows teams to brainstorm and collaborate on brand ideas. Overall, these should help support stronger brand alignment.

4.    XM Cloud crowd-pleasers for marketers

There are a number of enhancements that predominantly feature within XM Cloud, the core SaaS-based CMS, that will particularly appeal to marketing teams. These include:

• A new A/B/n testing capability that goes hand in hand with the new AI-generated variants. By carrying out testing the platform will preserve the best-performing variant.
• A new improved dashboard for marketers covering site performance, user behaviour and more.
• A new “no code low code” site collections capability that allows marketing teams to “create, duplicate and manage” multiple sites, with a new improved interface.
• A new “publishing visibility feature” that provides a better overview of where and when content is due to go live.

It’s good to see there are some active improvements to interfaces to support more control for marketers over what can become an increasingly complex platform. Also to ensure the developers don’t feel left out, Sitecore XM Cloud now also supports Angular and .NET Core frameworks. We’d like to see these new marketer-friendly features all eventually end up in the XP product.

5.    Digital Asset Management (DAM) gets a bit of love

There are also some improvements to Sitecore’s native DAM capabilities that also inevitably lean on AI:

• A new visual search facility to help marketers find the right assets that covers capabilities such as visual similarity, reverse-image search, and colour-based search.
• The ability to use to automate the tagging of content, ensuring a consistent use of metadata.
• A new “public collections” app that means they can more easily share approved assets with third parties such as digital agencies, something which we welcome here at 3chillies.

6.    Additional support to transition from Sitecore XP to XM

Sitecore has made no secret that it would like to get more clients to transition to the new SaaS-based offerings and has created programmes and services to help make the process easier. Although not part of the product announcement, an interesting interview with Sitecore CEO Dave O’Flanagan reveals that Sitecore as part of the release are introducing a number of AI tools that help auto-migrate any site to Sitecore Cloud XM, not necessarily just those on Sitecore XP.

More product evolution from Sitecore

The latest product announcement from Sitecore is another evolution of the platform, with AI very much at the centre. Many features that will be welcomed by marketing teams.

If you’d like to discuss any of the new changes or you have a question about Sitecore, then get in touch!