Highlights

Optimizely recently announced enhancements to its Opal AI solution targeted at marketers
Built on Google's Gemini models, Opal is now embedded across Optimizely's ecosystem
Features include configurable brand-aware capabilities and evolved agentic tools
New capabilities promise to unlock greater automation, end-to-end experimentation analysis, and more
Interview with Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger

I love talking to leaders and founders across the CMS and DXP industries, from early-stage to market movers. Getting the story from the top down is often the best way to unpack the big vision and where things are headed.

I also watch a ton of demos (like a metric ton), and it’s not uncommon for the founder of a startup or scale-up to give me a personal tour of a new product or feature.

But when the incomparable Alex Atzberger recently asked if he could share his screen and walk me through some of Optimizely’s overhaul of its Opal AI, I was taken aback – not just by the offer, but by the absolute joy he exuded during his presentation.

“We’re transforming how marketing works,” he said, glowingly. “That's the big part. That's what really matters.”

It goes without saying that he has the chops to run a solid presentation, reinforced by a Harvard MBA and proven experience steering Episerver through the Optimizely acquisition in 2020 – a strategy that's paid off in spades.

But having the CEO of an industry-leading DXP and content marketing platform usher me through a product experience was unexpected, and it spoke volumes about his deep connection to his company’s products – and his passion for showing it off. And this intersection with AI has him really excited.

“We’ve actually transformed Optimizely so fundamentally over the last couple of years with our acquisitions that we kind of redefined the DXP,” he said. “We feel that we have the most modern tech stack right now among the DXP vendors, and AI fits directly into this narrative. Because what it allows us to do is really build an AI that actually taps into all aspects of Optimizely One.”

As Alex explained, the goal for Optimizely has always been consistent: Make the lives of marketers better. To meet that goal, the company has transformed its Opal AI with a new user interface and a direct embed across its Optimizely One product suite – an operating system that gives marketing teams the full breadth of tools for collaborating, creating high-quality content, attaining scalable personalization, and more.

Opal’s enhanced features effectively unlock what Alex described as “infinite use cases” for marketing and digital teams – including task automation, brand-perfect content creation, end-to-end experimentation analysis, and more. Opal also reduces the cost of onboarding and operating AI systems by eliminating the need for multiple AI assistants and vendors.

Optimizely rules the roost in multiple industry categories, as evidenced by its position on both the Gartner Magic Quadrants for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) and Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs). As an enterprise ecosystem, it offers broad extensibility based on an organization’s goals – which, in marketing, often crosses streams.

The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant diagrams for DXPs and CMPs. Source: Gartner

As Alex explained, AI is woven throughout, amplifying productivity and helping individual team members be more effective.

“If you do A/B testing in order to know what customers want and what their behaviors are, or if you do this through a visual builder and a CMS solution, or if you do this through a workflow in our CMP, all of it has the same goal,” he said. “So when I look at the value of AI, it’s allowing you to take all of this to the next level, making marketers even more productive and giving them superpowers.”

As the demand for agentic strategies heats up and vendors rush to add capabilities, Optimizely is coolly leading the way with Opal as the foundation. In our recent chat, Alex covered some of the granular details of Opal's new upgrades, which promise to supercharge everything. But it was his guided tour that really raised the roof.

Supercharging Opal for the agent revolution

The word “context” has been reaching peak noise in the CMS space recently, particularly as data becomes the key focus for training AI models. Opal excels by leveraging comprehensive context across the Optimizely system, tapping more relevant information to make engines more effective and accurate.

With 78% of organizations now using AI in at least one business function, Opal is meeting this breathtaking market demand by ensuring that teams can stay ahead of shifting market dynamics and maximize their impact in a fast-moving digital world.

This latest release of Opal is built on Google’s Gemini models, expanding on the company’s commitment to making AI accessible, practical, and valuable – all powered by industry-leading technology, and all within Optimizely One’s secure, SOC 2-compliant environment.

There are several key enhancements to the AI, and Alex walked me through each. First, the platform UX has been redesigned to be more intuitive, putting marketers in control with greater interconnectedness. Opal builds context windows, intelligently combining diverse data sources from across an organization's unique knowledge content and corporate brand components.

“It takes context from all the capabilities in Optimizely One,” Alex clarified. “All the experiments that have been run, all the CMP content you have. All your digital assets. It understands all aspects of what defines the DXP, so it's not limited to CMS or specific to one solution. And that’s how it really knows your brand.”

Second, chat is persistent across Opal, and it features a rich memory that’s enhanced by Optimizely's domain expertise. It incorporates proven content and experimentation best practices with a simple layer of interaction designed for marketers.

“These tools are part of our definition of our AI, and we wanted them to matter to marketers. So we didn't put in things they wouldn't find interesting. We're leveraging tools that a marketer would actually want to use.”

“It’s just like a chat or ChatGPT,” he said. “It has the history of what you have done before. So it keeps learning with you as you go along, as you keep building. So if you are in CMP, and then you go into CMS, it stays with you, and you can continue to interact with it, and continue to go back and forth, which I think is critical in AI.”

Opal’s agents also tap a wide range of tools that are purpose-built for marketing and designed to seamlessly integrate with external systems to augment their capabilities. As Alex explained, there’s a lot of power under the hood, giving marketers access to high-value tools. For example, you can perform an SEO web page analysis, conduct keyword research, create a PowerPoint deck, or even analyze an image.

“These tools are part of our definition of our AI, and we wanted them to matter to marketers,” he pointed out. “So we didn't put in things they wouldn't find interesting. We're leveraging tools that a marketer would actually want to use.”

Finally, the agentic layer is fully unlocked within Opal, letting users fine-tune the AI with custom instructions. This allows them to orchestrate agents within advanced custom workflows, delivering unparalleled agentic capabilities within a dynamic UX. There are also documented instructions and even an audit trail to track hallucinations, giving users unprecedented control and insight. And all of this is intentionally made simple for marketers.

“On the agent side, when you actually write or define an agent, it's not something that your dev team does,” Alex said. “You can actually do this as a marketer through instructions and write them in natural language.”

Meeting marketers where they work

Throughout our conversation, Alex doubled down on the marketer as the heart of Optimizely’s mission. He was quick to remind me that developers are there, too – perhaps in a corresponding chamber – and together, they’re weaving the fabric of what a modern digital team looks like.

As he eluded, Optimizely is enhancing those connections with flexible solutions that enable a more composable and agile approach within a trusted, integrated DXP ecosystem – one that weaves AI across every function.

“From my point of view, the key stakeholder for us is the marketer,” Alex said. “But a marketing team today includes developers. My marketing organization has developers on the payroll, and so do many marketing organizations. And I think the fact is, you want composability, so you don't want to be locked into a walled garden. But you also see benefits when you can actually bring things together.”

This is the point in the conversation where things got really interesting. As Alex explained the need to meet users where they're at – and where they do their work – he offered to take me through Optimizely’s CMP with a focus on Opal.

“I didn't plan to do this,” he said, beaming with pride, “but I would love to just show you.”

And thus began that first-hand demo I spoke of. Overall, it was tight, elegant, and genuine, showcasing how he himself operates within Optimizely’s marketing organization using their CMP features. He showed me around his team’s schedule and resources, demonstrating the intuitiveness of the interface and how accessible the AI features are throughout the experience.

The big “aha” was the outright simplicity of generating active campaigns. Not just the structure, but full-blown, ready-to-roll marketing activities armed with all the essentials. In just a few clicks, he showed me how anyone can move from a basic idea to executing and optimizing. It’s now become a foundation, and the fact that a CEO is able to participate illustrates the potential of its extensibility. It's no longer a black box of complexity.

“Each of these campaigns has activities behind it, and this is where our entire marketing team lives,” he said. “If it's not part of this, it does not exist in our company.”

Alex also showed how to manage everything using the calendar, which provides a global view of what kind of campaigns and activities are running. As he said, this is the part where a marketer really gets excited, because the entire ecosystem is within their reach – and it all becomes super manageable.

Opal is embedded across the Optimizely One ecosystem, including its CMP. Source: Optimizely

As I mentioned, Opal is ever-present and allows users to start actual campaigns using natural language prompts. He gave me an example, asking Opal to set up a campaign focused on AI and healthcare. In seconds, it furnished a campaign brief with the essential messages, content pillars, thought leadership assets, success stories, and even expert insights gleaned from knowledge bases.

Along with suggestions for KPIs, I could see campaign elements that focused on delivering personalized patient experiences, automating routine administrative processes, and more.

“We basically went from having nothing to actually having a full campaign defined for us in the solution itself,” Alex reinforced. “My team, my marketers, they're saving time with this.”

Optimizely's AI is accelerating the content marketing lifecycle by generating comprehensive briefs. Source: Optimizely

He also showed me how Optimizely One’s analytics are providing actionable insights on performance, suggesting more concise headlines, where to test more descriptive labels, and other tweaks that enhance banners, social proof, and more.

Opal is already widely used, and I’ve heard from a couple of agencies building with Optimizely that the benefits are tangible. Alex codified this, reinforcing how the new capabilities are delivering value for partners and their customers and how the emphasis on unlocking that value is guiding the opportunities to a more visionary level.

“We’re doing tons of sessions right now, and the feedback on Opal is outstanding from partners,” he said. “They all want to be part of it, because they want to help companies transform their marketing. But I don't think you're going in with the message that we’re making your CMS a little bit better. I don't think that's the message anymore.”

With more users and teams leaning on AI as part of their content and campaign operations, pricing is always a question. As Alex explained, Optimizely’s AI is built on a credit-based system, where creating a campaign brief might cost 100 credits, so you can measure consumption more efficiently and transparently.

Why it matters

There’s no denying that the world is laser-focused on the promise of agentic AI. While generative capabilities have injected a wide range of features and efficiencies for marketing teams, the evolution of agent frameworks is taking it all to the next level and providing an entire frontier of high-utility automation and engagement.

Like some of its large enterprise peers in the DXP space, Optimizely has been leveraging agent components in its ecosystem for quite some time, giving them a head start on harnessing “agent thinking” as part of their journey to delivering agentic experiences.

The innate flexibility of Opal’s enhanced features – delivering the potential of “infinite use cases” for marketing and digital teams – could be setting a new bar for AI and agent extensibility. And by embedding it across its Optimizely One ecosystem, it’s rendering AI as a natural part of its UX, giving marketers a highly accessible co-pilot that’s purpose-built for what a marketer needs.

Powered by Gemini, Opal’s configurable and brand-aware capabilities are answering the call for marketers. At this stage in the AI evolution, marketers are becoming hyper-selective about the quality of output from their tools and models. Knowledge bases and guardrails have become essential, and Opal’s AI-generated output helps maintain brand voice and authenticity.

From a CMP perspective, the AI upgrade is a game changer, enabling users to simplify the entire campaign lifecycle with brand-aware capabilities and do more with less at higher velocity. I saw firsthand just how fluid the experience can be, and how easily everyone on a team – from a marketing pro to a CEO – can collaborate in one place with unmatched efficiency.

As impressive as these tech leaps are, watching Alex demo the new features with delight was a reminder that we make software for humans – and letting simplicity and intuitiveness guide the experience should be paramount. To that end, Alex sees the role of partners and builders as key to the evolution of digital experiences, particularly as the transition to AI whips up complexity and even anxiety.

“Tech is never only about the technology, it’s always about people, and that won't change,” he said. “I still think you need all the partners – the Blends, the Valtechs, the Accentures – because they all have big and important businesses as customers, and people will need to have their hands held through the change.”

Part of that change is the potential impact on people. I’ve written about the precipitous decline in developers entering the software industry since 2019, and displacement within the knowledge job category is a real concern for both practitioners and organizations. Rather than focusing on limitations, Alex is focused on efficiency.

“We really think about Optimizely as an infinite workforce,” he explained. “ Rather than having to hire another person, you're tapping into capabilities that allow you to get more done.”

And that’s precisely what they’re doing: getting more done. And they have the talent to keep pushing. As Alex said, he and Optimizely president Shafqat Islam have one of the best AI development engineering teams in the martech industry – a credit to the advances they’ve made with Opal.

Of course, if there’s one constant, it’s change. Along with the challenges of an unpredictable global economy and a fierce competitive topology, AI continues to disrupt roadmaps.

But as long as Optimizely continues to double down on its promise to make the lives of marketers better, they have the right fuel to supercharge their way forward.

Looking for guidance on Optimizely? Talk to an expert.

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News

Optimizely Opal Gets Supercharged for Agentic AI, Powering Infinite Use Cases for Marketers