‘Seasons of Love’: Sitecore Symposium 2025 Sings, Putting AI and Marketers in the Spotlight

Highlights

• Sitecore Symposium 2025 was held November 3-5 in Orlando, Florida
• The company introduced its new SitecoreAI with Agentic Studio capabilities and simplified pricing
• New Sitecore Studio marks the rise of ‘customizable SaaS’
• Partner-led innovation was showcased across sessions and a new agentic AI Partner Challenge
• Featured speakers Jesse Cole and Paul Roetzer offered entertaining and insightful talks
• The Sitecore community continues to prove why people are at the heart of everything

When the curtain rises for the second act of RENT, the modern musical sensation that transformed Broadway, the entire cast assembles on stage, a gritty collective of 1980s bohème New Yorkers struggling with social and economic inequality – and the harrowing realities of the AIDS crisis. 

Together, they join voices in an iconic symphony called “Seasons of Love.” And even if you’re not a fan of the angelic crooning heard ‘round Gotham’s 42nd Street or the genre of musical theater (what’s wrong with you?), this song is positively undeniable:

Five-hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes…
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylight, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee…
How do you measure a year in the life?

It hasn’t quite been a year since Eric Stine landed the leading role as Sitecore’s CEO, but he’s already changing the season. 

Six months ago, when the news broke that he would replace predecessor Dave O’Flanagan – the founder of Sitecore-acquired Boxever and the man who helmed the ship during the meteoric growth of Sitecore XM Cloud – there were questions about the company's direction. 

At the time, I had a long call with Eric about his plans. He projected a lot of confidence about the forthcoming innovation, but what I remember most is what he said about Sitecore being more than just another software vendor, and the CEO role being more than a job. For him, this all went much deeper. 

It was about love. Love for this company. Love for the possibilities it represented. 

Of course, turning that love into growth was paramount, and on day one, he started rewriting the script. As he told me last week at Sitecore Symposium 2025 in Orlando, he took everything back to strategy, divining what truly sets Sitecore apart – something that might have gotten lost along the way as Sitecore swam in the red tide of competitive commoditization while eschewing the albatrosses of cost and complexity.

“We started with clarifying our vision, and why it’s so important to be the company that believes digital experiences can be so powerful that they can change the world,” he said. “We focused our mission on simplifying how marketers reach, engage, convert, and serve their audience, and understanding that what we do better than anyone else is help enterprises turn immense amounts of content into experiences that are so personal, we can help you connect with your patient, your citizen, your student, your customer, better than anybody else.”

Now, the real potential for making personalized connections a reality is being unlocked by artificial intelligence in a big way. And Sitecore's new vision is changing the game.

AI and marketers take center stage at Symposium 2025

If we’re measuring the last year for Sitecore, it’s clear that AI is the star. And at Symposium 2025, the spotlight was on full power. When Eric made his entrance for his opening keynote, “Seasons of Love” filled the auditorium, settling over an ocean of practitioners, partners, and customers from across Sitecore’s expansive global community. 

It was the perfect accompaniment for the Tony Award-winning producer of The Outsiders, who just happens to moonlight as a visionary tech leader. It's likely the other way around, but the bottom line is that he's a creator. A restless explorer pushing the boundaries.

Sitecore CEO Eric Stine during his opening keynote at Sitecore Symposium 2025.

This year’s Symposium was held at the resplendent Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort in Orlando, a stone’s throw away from a vast universe built by “Imagineers,” the dreamers behind Disney’s epic theme parks. The partner pavilion was a veritable wonderland of cutting-edge agencies and technology providers, from Americaneagle.com to Gradial to TechGuilds, each offering unique solutions that aligned with Sitecore's AI horizon and the future of digital experiences.

Borrowing from the leadership traits of his own mentors, Eric and team strived to make this year’s Symposium as inclusive as possible. That started with tactile experiences like… puppies (by god, they had adorable puppies). But choosing Orlando also meant outdoor parties in October, an exclusive night at Universal Studios, and a built-in excuse for attendees to bring their families along.

“Why wouldn't you want to upend expectations?” Eric said when I asked about the overall experience. 

(Clockwise from upper left) You put the “I” in “AI”, the Horizontal pool party, those puppies, and the author with Sitecore's Jake DiMare.

Orlando is the preeminent “experience economy,” a creative hub and a crossroads betwixt fantasy and reality, where impossible becomes possible. It was a fitting backdrop for the unveiling of Sitecore’s AI-first transformation and a new season in its nearly 25-year journey.   

To be sure, the company has long been a pioneer of artificial intelligence and machine learning innovation (think Sitecore Cortex). That track has accelerated into the generative era, crystallized by last year’s introduction of Sitecore Stream, its cross-product, brand-aware AI copilot. 

But last week’s announcements marked a pivotal shift, integrating AI on a foundational level and even branding it onto its core product, what it now calls SitecoreAI. As Chief Product Officer Roger Connolly told me during an analyst briefing last Tuesday, it’s not AI on top, it’s AI on the inside, unifying Sitecore’s product ecosystem and enabling agent orchestration within its base functionality.

Eric codified how this is unlocking true one-to-one personalization, and how it’s central to Sitecore’s ambitions in a world where AI engines are consuming search traffic and websites are waning. As he said, these “seasons of love” are becoming “seasons of pain” – and we have to adapt.

“We see our North Star as content personalization, reaching that person on the other side of whatever experience that is going to be the genesis of your relationship with them,” Eric explained. “You have to reach them, and you have to reach them in ways that are different and engaging. And the only way that's different is by being personal.”

If AI was the star, the marketer was the heart of this show. With thick stacks of tools crushing their cognitive capacity, Eric saw an opportunity to expand Sitecore’s value as a high-utility content toolbox, equipped with agents that can perform a host of tasks. And that’s exactly what SitecoreAI is focused on: helping marketers perform with less friction and more flexibility.

“To give the marketer a platform and say you shouldn't have to buy five or six things to reach the Instagram channel and the LinkedIn feed and the Perplexity summary and your own website, because all of those things are just variants of the same exact thing,” he said. “It actually became screamingly obvious to me that we had to bring them all together.”

For marketers, AI has been a catalyst for change, and Eric sees Sitecore as the next-gen platform for delivering the possibilities. And while the evolution to SitecoreAI from XM Cloud can be measured in the last year, Eric said it’s been almost four years of building for this new world – a world beyond the website. A world of multi-channel experiences that demand greater control if marketers expect to break through with their messages.

“Good art wasn’t good enough for The Outsiders musical,” he said, relating the challenge back to his own experience as a Broadway producer. And he’s right: reaching that one customer at the right time and in the right place requires both art and science. 

I left last year’s Symposium in Nashville feeling positive about Sitecore’s traction. Hot off its XM Cloud sales streak, the company had achieved critical HIPAA compliance across its products and introduced an integrated AI service that was also available to its legacy XP customers. It was also tuning into its partner community and addressing key issues. There was wind in the sails. 

But this year’s Symposium knocked me over. There was an energetic charge in the air, like the curtain was rising on something new – something we’ve been waiting for. Over the last few years, DXPs have made marginal gains in the innovation column, but Sitecore’s announcements last week added fuel to the fire, and so many of the people I spoke to were feeling the power of the performance. 

There might be 525,600 reasons why this year’s Symposium was a hit, but I’m distilling it down to the top five hits that keep playing in my head. Feel free to sing along.

1. ‘One Song Glory’ – SitecoreAI brings all the music together

When SitecoreAI was announced during Eric’s opening keynote, it was a shock and awe moment. I wrote an analysis last week just after the news broke, colored by my own interaction with a live, production-worthy demo in Sitecore’s pavilion booth. 

I have to give their engineering team credit: this wasn’t vaporware or smoke-and-mirrors. And frankly, it couldn’t be. The product was slated to launch on November 10th for all current XM Cloud customers, and the shift was billed as being seamless, migration-free, and ready to roll.

I spent some quality time with several pre-sales technicians over two days, all of whom were already knowledgeable on the product. For deeper details, you can dig into my SitecoreAI overview, but I’ll highlight again what really stands out for me. 

First, Sitecore is connecting all of its products under a single, SaaS-native solution. That’s the entire Sitecore portfolio (CMS, DAM, MRM, CMP, CDP & Personalize, and Search), all “composed” and accessible with AI at its foundation. At the same time, the platform is providing the freedom of a flexible, composable ecosystem that’s backed by the security, scalability, and governance that make Sitecore a trusted vendor.

The SitecoreAI dashboard. Source: Sitecore

Along with a unified ecosystem, SitecoreAI is also reducing the friction to add features as needed. They’re making it possible for brands to test-drive capabilities with a base entitlement, meaning they can experience CMS, DAM, and other tools to see how they work in a meaningful way – and scale when ready. This could make Sitecore a more attractive play for driving PoCs and experimenting. 

Then there’s the UX. In a word, it’s beautiful, providing a clean, highly intuitive palette for creating, executing, and managing campaigns. Users can build and schedule with access to all the tools they need in one place, from developing briefs to driving actions and flows. They can also surface custom data from Google Analytics and other third-party platforms directly in their workspace. 

Let’s face it: marketers don’t need more tools, they need clarity. To that end, one of the things I love about SitecoreAI is the ability to surface the data you need alongside your other functions. This can be anything from Google Analytics stats to Tableau visualizations. No more switching between apps; by providing a simple interface that elevates the right resources, users can reduce cognitive overload and focus on what matters. 

Agentic Studio

One of the gems in SitecoreAI is the Agentic Studio, a creative workshop designed for marketers, enabling them to build and collaborate with AI. It’s robust, visually succinct, and offers a lot of customizability. Again, you can go deeper in my overview, but the big takeaway is this: Agentic Studio stands to save marketers hours (or more) of tedious work daily. 

At launch, Agentic Studio will offer 20 pre-built agents that automate complex workflows, giving users the flexibility to design their own agents and flows using simple visual tools with no coding required. This includes high-utility functions like a brand agent that validates your assets, a governance agent that scans for compliance issues, or even an optimization agent that studies how audiences behave. All of this is possible while keeping the marketer in the loop for reviews and approvals.  

SitecoreAI Agentic Studio. Source: Sitecore

There’s a lot of granular functionality to discover. In my review, I go a little deeper into SitecoreAI’s Agentic Flows, the real-time collaboration capabilities in Spaces, and how you can tap Signals and generate a brief to build and optimize a program based on your context. For marketers, this trusted intelligence can turn inspiration into campaigns in a fraction of the time.

SitecoreAI Pathway

Along with the SitecoreAI announcement was the introduction of SitecoreAI Pathway, which moves the needle on everyone’s favorite task: migration. It continues to be a persistent obstacle for modernization, but AI is opening up new possibilities – and Sitecore AI Pathway promises to ease and accelerate the scutwork while giving partners and customers more space to focus on frontend transformation.

Available now in the Sitecore360 package, SitecoreAI Pathway leverages artificial intelligence to automate content migration. The big note: According to Sitecore, Pathway can cut migration time by two-thirds, allowing sites to move quickly from legacy Sitecore XP to SitecoreAI. Pathway can also be harnessed to migrate from other platforms outside the Sitecore ecosystem, opening up the field for broader Sitecore adoption. 

The announcement of Pathway did create some initial anxiety for partners. While migration is generally seen as a burden, it’s still a revenue generator. Eric was quick to point out that Pathway is helping to solve a baseline problem that allows its partners to focus on what’s happening right now – and the agentic future ahead. 

“What partners do best is solve the problem in front of them,” he said. “And every single one of our partners knows that the value for their customer isn't in the migration. It's what happens once you've migrated. Today, there’s so much for our partner community to do, like using visual search and AI-based asset tagging to drive real-time, AI-driven personalization. The entire partner community is now thrilled that they have a platform where they can really provide value-added services. Because the migration, more than anything else, is the beginning.”

Simplified Pricing and Licensing

Transparency is key, and I’ve been critical of vendors that lack clarity around their pricing models. Sitecore has had its own historical challenges in this arena, but over the last year, its leadership has been meeting with partners and customers and collecting feedback – and now, it’s doubling down on making everything simpler. 

Reflecting this vision, everything under the new SitecoreAI will fall under a single license. This includes all the AI capabilities within the system. Eric believes this is a critical point in being able to deliver a complete solution where AI is going to be a foundational component.

“Would anybody charge you separately for the software and the SaaS?” he asked. “I believe that within years, maybe even months, AI is the product we're going to get. Because the expectation is that your product utilizes AI to get better. No one ever charged you when we moved to a fourth-generation object-oriented coding language.”

He’s right. But while Sitecore’s shift to simplified pricing could shake up the DXP ecosystem, the announcement did stir questions from partners about the specific details, which required some clarification. Still, the message on stage was laser-focused: no addons, no upsells, no tokens, no games. This could be one of SitecoreAI’s most attractive attributes. 

2. ‘Over the Moon’ – Sitecore Studio is the rise of customizable SaaS  

During Sitecore COO Dave Tilbury’s opening keynote on day two of Symposium, he opened with a thought-provoking observation. 

“The industry has been solving the wrong problem with SaaS,” he said, explaining how it wasn’t just about moving services to the cloud, but making the management of software easier – so organizations could focus on marketing.

Like other SaaS tools, XM Cloud has streamlined the experience for brands and their teams. But as Dave said, the process, integrations, and even the safeguards have become obstacles to modernization – and this was all on the shoulders of the SaaS vendors. 

That led to a basic question: Can we make SaaS customizable? If you can personalize your experiences, why not the experience in the tool you’re using? Shouldn’t you be able to tailor your platform and build, expand, and customize where you need it?

Sitecore COO Dave Tilbury introducing Sitecore Studio.

No one has fully cracked this “differentiator’s dilemma,” and Sitecore seized the opportunity to evolve XM Cloud in a new direction – powered by AI, and capable of expanding in a multitude of directions. It’s called Sitecore Studio, and it represents both an architectural and philosophical shift in how customers and partners will harness its SaaS-native capabilities to build and manage the next wave of digital experiences.

Sitecore Studio is an innovation layer of SitecoreAI, giving customers and partners a vehicle for building and customizing agents, workflows, marketing tasks, and more within a secure, governed workspace – a place where AI pros and no-code marketers can put the power of content into action. 

A bit like Voltron, Sitecore Studio is comprised of four components, coming together to power marketers. First, there’s the aforementioned Agentic Studio, which was announced as part of SitecoreAI. Serving as the agent command center, it will enable the deployment, creation, and orchestration of agents across the unified ecosystem.

Second is the App Studio, where partners can create custom apps and make them reusable components, rendering them extensible to other projects or customers. Builders can add custom logic and give their teams true agility when developing specialized use cases. 

Those apps fit tightly with the third component, Marketplace, a purpose-built storefront for scaling your creations. For partners, this could represent an entirely new channel for building and monetizing the agents they create.

Finally, Sitecore Connect provides a growing library of pre-built connectors developed by Sitecore to connect SitecoreAI into other enterprise apps. For example, you can access connectors to Salesforce, OpenAI, Gemini, and more – or build your own integrations as needed.

Sitecore Studio is crystallizing the concept of custom SaaS for Sitecore, but it’s also framing it for the market. As Dave said, competitors have fragments of this vision, but still remain disconnected. What makes Studio unique is that it delivers a complete picture with one unified system that’s fully governed.

“We’re not bolting customization onto SaaS as an afterthought with Sitecore AI,” he said. “We're making customization core to how our SaaS works. This is how our SaaS becomes your SaaS.”

Harmonizing around personalization

I asked Eric the all-important question of how Sitecore is equipped to compete with these offerings. There’s ample choice in the market, and I wanted to know how SitecoreAI and Studio can deliver for partners and customers while advancing their advantage. He boiled it down to three pillars that make it all a compelling pitch.

“The first thing is that I don't believe anyone has all of the composable components that we have at the level of excellence that we have achieved, and we are the only ones that are bringing them all together in a single platform you can buy,” he said. “The second is that we’re the only company out there delivering not just a proven AI embedded SaaS platform, but one that is fully customizable. It's the ability to build your own agents, to create your own custom use cases and flows across your Microsoft investment, your Salesforce investment, whatever you're leaning into.” 

As Eric told me, this extensibility is reflective of Sitecore’s tradition of being almost infinitely elastic in its ability to integrate across the ecosystem while simplifying the architecture. But at the same time, the ability to go custom with SaaS and empower customers and partners to make it bespoke to their business is a truly unique position.

The third pillar addresses the question of choice across the DXP grid. As Eric stated confidently, it’s Sitecore’s dominant footprint – over 500 partners, 2,500 MVPs, and an army of creatives and digital experts – that can bring any experience to life at any scale, and at any price point.

Case in point: Sitecore MVP George Chang of Hexagon sat down with me to discuss his company's SaaS and agentic transformation, but also reinforced the role of Platinum agency partner Remarkable as a key ingredient for continued success:

SitecoreAI and Sitecore Studio are promising to transform the technology, practices, and perhaps even the culture for Sitecore’s users. At the same time, the central focus on personalizing content for a segment of one has been unwavering. And with a complete picture, it’s now possible to deliver that vision of personalization.

“I will tell you that the thing that unites those three differentiators is that we are, for sure, the only company whose guiding philosophy is the patient, the student, the citizen, the customer,” he added. “At the other end of your experience or goal is to provide an experience that is so invisible, so seamless, that you have full freedom to speak to that person who really, really loves your brand.”

3. ‘What You Own’ – Pumping up the innovation volume 

As with every Symposium, we were once again treated to some astounding innovation. From featured partnerships with Microsoft and Accenture to lively customer panels, the pace of ideation and the development of real-world, AI-powered experiences built with Sitecore is accelerating.

I really enjoyed the mainstage session with Salesforce, where Sitecore CMO Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek explored the value of context and the dilemma of siloed data, and why AI needs the right environment to work. Of course, consolidating everything is hard, and according to a recent Salesforce report, most marketers aren’t satisfied with the results of these efforts – and as such, their personalization isn’t always hitting the mark. To develop trusted personalization, we need the right guardrails and systems of authority to govern things properly.   

Sitecore CMO Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek at Symposium 2025.

Michelle also gave an inspiring fireside chat with Talisha Padgett, General Manager of MarTech, AI, and Automation at Microsoft. In addition to her tech duties, Talisha is an empathy coach, giving her a unique perspective on the intersection of human and AI evolution and the impact on our work. One of the big topics they discussed: how do we ensure that the pursuit of efficiency doesn’t compromise creativity? 

One of Sitecore’s smartest initiatives this year was the creation of an AI Innovation Lab for marketers. Designed in collaboration with Microsoft, it has already yielded solution-focused outcomes for customers and allowed deeper experimentation on AI projects for a variety of use cases. As Talisha said, experimentation is vital, and we need to embrace this mindset if we hope to scale. 

(Left to right) Microsoft's Talisha Padgett with Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, the Sitecore AI Innovation Lab in the Symposium pavilion.

There were, as usual, dozens of sessions across the two days that featured innovative outcomes, most partner-led. I was there for many of them, including Altudo’s CEO, Rahul Khosla, sharing the impacts of XM Cloud for GoTo, delivering 200% better lead quality and 78% more organic trials for the cloud communications provider. Impressive gains.

Always a Symposium favorite, this year’s Sitecore Previews offered a glimpse at what’s ahead. Hosted by CPO Roger Connolly, the AI theme was once again front and center, with continued innovation coming within SitecoreAI Pathway and enhanced capabilities for personalizing content at an atomic level. 

Liz Nelson, Sitecore’s VP of Product and Technology, focused on some new features to power campaigns, enabling users to add timed events based on the marketer’s clock, so publishing is no longer an act of faith, but an act of precision. Search is also becoming the experience, and Liz shared how Intelligent, hyper-personalization will transform pages into answers. No more static content – everything will be adaptable.

Sitecore CPO Roger Connolly leading the Sitecore Previews panel.

Mo Cherif, VP of AI and Innovation, mapped out advancements with Agentic Studio that look really promising from an extensibility perspective (one example: introducing agents inside PowerPoint to make updates). He also explained how Studio’s Spaces will become more robust and provide greater collaboration via a shared canvas. 

One of the highlights of Symposium was Sitecore’s inaugural Partner Challenge, where its customizable SaaS met agentic AI with some astounding results. In just six weeks, participants developed a host of innovative agents using the new Sitecore Studio, and proposals were scored around specific criteria. Most importantly, the entries needed to be fully deployable solutions.

Attendees were treated to video vignettes of each winning project, and I was super impressed by the scope and ambition of each project. Horizontal Digital (a Sitecore Platinum Partner for over 20 years) took home the gold for its Sense Agent, which was created in conjunction with customer Pet Supplies Plus. Sense analyzes reviews across various sources, gauging sentiment and brand voice against company guidelines to monitor perception and maintain consistency. 

Horizontal Digital's co-founder, president, and CEO Sabin Ephrem speaking during the Partner Challenge.

“At Horizontal, we believe the future of customer experience lies in turning intelligence into action, and that’s exactly what this collaboration with Pet Supplies Plus represents,” said Sabin Ephrem, co-founder, president, and CEO at Horizontal. “With our new AI-powered solution, Sense, we’ve shown how agentic AI can redefine what’s possible for digital experience.”

Zont Digital, Altudo, and One North also scored as runners-up for their agentic innovations, demonstrating the potential of what partners can now build in Sitecore Studio.

4. ‘Light my Candle’ – Featured speakers brought the spark

Symposium always draws an assortment of celebrities and personalities to its main stage, but this year’s headliner was more than “a-peeling” – and you didn’t have to be a baseball fan to find Jesse Cole’s keynote a home run. At one point, he had the entire audience dancing in the aisles and (you guessed it) going bananas. 

But that’s the whole point: he makes people feel his brand.

I recently wrote about the owner of the world-famous Savannah Bananas franchise and how exciting it was that he was pitching at Symposium. Jesse is a one-of-a-kind showman and a tacitly provocative dresser (he might have the only yellow suit in existence). But he’s also a dynamic leader, a brilliant speaker, and a geyser of inspiration – and he left the audience with a deep bench of swing-worthy reflections and insights.

Jesse Cole, owner of the Savannah Bananas, speaking at Sitecore Symposium 2025.

If you’re not familiar with the Bananas ball club, it was once called “The Greatest Show in Sports” by ESPN, and the most fun you’ll ever have watching America’s favorite pastime. Banana Ball follows its own zany rules, injecting dancing players, acrobatics, and trick plays that challenge the status quo – often bringing fans and spectators into the experience.

Becoming a world-famous brand wasn’t easy. As Jesse retold his origin story, it was fraught with heartache and failure. As he said, “You have to be willing to get through the messy to get to the great.” He’s still guided by that belief, taking risks to solve customer problems and striving to deliver the best and most entertaining experience. And making the unscalable scalable. 

From start to finish, Jesse was dropping relatable knowledge. He talked about the importance of eliminating friction and how “every pay point is a pain point” that needs to be conquered. That’s why he adopted a single, affordable ticket price that’s all-inclusive – not just your seat, but your food and drinks.

Jesse also framed experimentation and curiosity as essential tools for creating memorable moments. He expressed the importance of “winning the upper deck” and serving every fan like they mattered. He also shared a few touching stories where his staff and players personally connected with individual fans so they felt seen and celebrated. It was powerful stuff. 

I don’t usually feel so moved by a conference session, but this was, in a word, spectacular – a high-energy empathy jolt that set the tone for everything. I also sensed the clear alignment around Sitecore’s strategy, taking a page from Jesse’s book on how to simplify pricing and listen to the needs of customers and partners (er.. fans). 

They knocked this one out of the park. 

Paul Roetzer, founder of SmarterX and the Marketing Institute, speaking at Sitecore Symposium 2025.

This was my third time seeing Paul Roetzer, founder of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute. He’s an acclaimed and respected voice in the AI landscape, and his transformative thinking has helped business and marketing leaders harness the value of AI, apply it responsibly and ethically, and maintain a core focus on people and purpose. 

Once again, Paul brought a sense of calm and wisdom to the AI blitz, giving us a real-world view of how it's impacting marketing and business. Since I last saw his talk, AI has generally evolved in the direction he predicted. In other words, he’s an excellent barometer for what’s ahead. 

In his talk, he covered the five big topics we should be focusing on with AI – and the first was, perhaps, the most personal. When it comes to AI, many people feel behind the eight ball, and that makes sense given the pace of change. 

Just how fast is it changing? “Everyday, we’re using the dumbest form of AI ever,” he said. At the same time, most organizations don’t even have AI policies, councils, or roadmaps in place. There’s a lot to do, and Paul reinforced how we’re all at a disadvantage. 

It wasn’t a shock to hear that big tech is making big bets on AI, and Paul dug into the reasons why. He also framed the evolution of LLMs as just the beginning, and how the field of established players (Microsoft, OpenAI, and a few others) will likely be the only ones left standing when it all shakes out.

I found his story about PJ Ace – the innovator behind the world’s leading AI-native ad agency, Genre.ai – to be especially poignant. Ace famously produced a viral video for Kalshi (a trading app) entirely with AI, which would have cost millions to shoot. While that might be displacing people and resources, it’s also enabling creators to bring their visions to life. 

Perhaps the biggest takeaway was that every knowledge worker will be impacted by AI, and we can already feel the effects. It’s becoming omnipresent in everything we use, and given this reality, we have a choice: put our heads in the sand or accelerate our literacy and capabilities. He also recommended that we focus on activities where human authenticity matters. 

5. ‘Seasons of Love’ – The chorus of the Sitecore community

So I’m a bit of a Broadway nut. I try to work shows into my New York trips whenever possible, but RENT holds a special place in my heart. Last month, my son – a senior theater BFA at the University of Florida – completed a three-week run playing Roger, one of the leads in this musical. Serendipitous? For sure.

There's something about RENT that perfectly parallels this moment for Sitecore. First, theater is the poetry of people in motion. It allows us to connect with art on a deeply personal level, to empathetically dial into a story and feel the energy from the humans telling it. Theater is also a community, a niche, a cohort of like-minded individuals collaborating, struggling, and celebrating in unison.  

And of course, theater is content. It's the creative expression of actors, singers, dancers, set designers, marketers – a cacophony of humans delivering a vision to an audience. It's no wonder Eric and his own team channeled the spirit of RENT to reinforce the roles of people in manifesting an AI-powered future where people matter most.

I attend a lot of conferences, and few of the presentations I’ve seen approach the inspiring vulnerability of Eric’s opening keynote. In front of a sea of people, he shared his own personal story of coming out and the importance of having a community to lean on. Exhibiting this level of honesty on stage – in front of a sea of people – was both courageous and authentic. It also reinforced the level of trust he’s building with everyone, internally and externally.

Trust doesn't come easy. Partners want transparency, and when the new pricing was announced at Symposium, some felt a lack of clarity. Others voiced concerns about legacy customers and guiding a clear path to SitecoreAI. Over the years, both customers and partners have had gripes, but Eric’s willingness to listen and adapt – and sending his lieutenants on the road to gather feedback – is a welcome sea change. 

Honesty often requires vulnerability. Much of what Sitecore is proposing with its new strategy is replete with both opportunity and risk, and they’ve been up front about it. The future can feel like a scary place, but having a trusted community is how we face it. Together. 

Like Jesse Cole said (channeling baseball metaphors at every turn), we only achieve success if we keep stepping up to the plate and swinging for the fences. We need more “mirror moments” in our customer’s shoes to understand where the pain points are. We have to put fans first if we plan to keep them. 

And the best way to do that is with the power of people – one of Sitecore's best assets. Symposium brings this global network of humans into focus, celebrating its diversity and innovation. Maintaining that lifeblood and loyalty is a challenge, but the community keeps showing up for what's next, and most people I spoke to were enthusiastic about what they saw last week. 

Since we’re measuring things in a year, I asked Eric what’s ahead for 2026. 

He laughed, admitting that it was a relief not to think about 2030.

“We'll turn 25 years old on April 26,” he gleamed. “I think it’s remarkable for any technology company to achieve that milestone and have navigated from on-premises to web-enabled to internet-based to pure SaaS, and now to fully AI-embedded and SaaS native. The fact that we have led the market for a quarter of a century in a space that is only a quarter of a century old is a tremendous point of pride. So you can look for a really big celebration, not of us, but a celebration of our customers and our partner community next year.”

Sitecore’s new season comes at a pivotal time. Market uncertainty is rampant. IT budgets are shrinking, and enterprises are rethinking their technology investments. At the same time, AI is driving everything, and businesses are shifting back to composed systems with less fragmented, more integrated solutions to build their AI strategies. 

Given the market opportunity, this is a chance for Sitecore to do things differently. Better. To step into its power. And if they continue to listen – to tune into the voices across their community – they might just take home the Tony.    

For Eric’s part, he hopes to be in this leading role for a long time to come. But he was quick to point out that it’s not about him. It’s about the customers and their experiences.

“It doesn't belong to me,” he said. “I'm only renting this chair.”

But he’s owning the moment. And that’s why Sitecore is singing.