The digital world is getting downright frantic about agentic.

It seems like only yesterday that we were obsessed with LLMs. Now we’re moving on to entirely new acronyms like MCP and AEO.

Wait… What just happened? If you’re a little shellshocked by the speed of change and general unpredictability, welcome to the club. Every business is struggling to keep up.

This mad dash to AI is creating a confusing morass, and that’s especially true for marketers. As brands hustle to unlock the value of AI tools and strategies, digital experience creators are trying to navigate the complexity, uncertainty, and sheer overwhelm of this brave new AI world.

Sitecore CEO Eric Stine has been watching the drama unfold. As he told me this week, he and his team have been witnessing what AI is doing to marketers – and the marketing ecosystem – as it wreaks havoc on many of the industry’s foundational tenets.

Case in point: According to research from Natasha Sommerfield and the team at Bain & Company, 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” search results, which have reduced clickthrough traffic by up to 25%.

Those are breathtaking numbers, leaving marketers and brands with a lot of existential questions. How do we engage consumers when clicks and site visits are withering? How can we simplify the chaos and find real solutions? Is this the end of SEO as we knew it?

This is where Eric sees real opportunity for Sitecore and its customers.

“I don't think there's any reason to get rid of a classic,” he said lightly. “I just think the ‘S’ in ‘SEO’ stands for ‘Sitecore Experience Optimization,’ because what we’re doing with AI is continuing to simplify how marketers can reach, engage, and serve their audience. So we're putting the power of AI into their hands to create and unlock the possibilities of personalization at scale, and make that a reality for every marketer and every budget.”

To usher in this wave of simplicity for reaching, engaging, and serving customers, Eric shared with me the launch of Sitecore.ai – a dynamic digital experience destination built for marketers around the promise and potential of AI.

More than a website, this center of excellence is a sort of singularity, illustrating how content, data, and intelligence can be synthesized to power the next era of digital engagement. The experience showcases Sitecore’s AI-first, cloud-native DXP for omnichannel content optimization, and it’s packed with case studies, interviews with digital visionaries, and other resources to help you stay ahead of AI.

A screenshot of a video conference

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The new Sitecore.ai website. Source: Sitecore.ai

“We conceived Sitecore.ai as a destination for marketers to explore the future of digital experience powered by AI,” Eric explained. “We wanted to show what it means when you put the power of AI in your hands and create opportunities for one-to-one connection with every audience member, whoever they are, wherever they are, whenever they want to be reached.”

Built as a kind of “living” demonstration of what’s ahead, Sitecore.ai promises a blend of editorial storytelling, episodic content, and hands-on interaction to show how agentic AI is transforming marketing. To that end, Eric said, Sitecore is embracing agentic as a foundational position.

“We see the future of digital as an ‘agentic experience platform,’ going from the DXP to the EXP, where marketers are orchestrating agents operating on their behalf to create experiences that cut across not just our portfolio – not just digital content marketing, search and personalization, and, of course, the core CMS – but also across the marketing stack.”

As Eric described, agents could execute higher-order functions in a variety of applications. For example, they could coordinate with ABM functions on your 6sense platform or understand changes in trend data like average sales cycle, deal size, and win rate on your Salesforce and Agentforce platforms. The possibilities, it seems, are endless.

Key to the Sitecore.ai experience is the signature Future of Digital series, where marketers can explore relevant topics like real-time personalization, conversational discovery, and intelligent automation. It’s all designed to spark curiosity and conversation and build confidence in moving forward with AI.

“The Future of Digital is a way for marketers to understand what’s ahead and what that looks like,” Eric said. And a big key to unlocking that future rests in the cloud.

XM Cloud: The ‘digital on-ramp’ to the agentic highway

Central to the future envisioned on Sitecore.ai, Sitecore XM Cloud is being positioned as the gateway for organizations to begin their journey to an agentic digital future.

There’s been a huge amount of momentum with XM Cloud, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. As I covered in February during a conversation with CPO Roger Connolly, XM Cloud has been a bright spot in the company’s bottom line, delivering 100% growth after an explosive drive in 2024 – making it the most successful product in Sitecore's decades-long history.

This also followed a stunning revenue revelation at last year’s Sitecore Symposium, which saw the company surpass $500 million in ARR, much of it reflecting the XM Cloud effect.

“We believe that the future of AI was born in the cloud and will live there, and that customers who are on a common cloud architecture will benefit from an AI-native solution.”

It’s fair to say a lot is riding on this “cloud power” to usher in the next phase of the agentic evolution. As more brands look to invest in broadening their agent strategy – moving into more progressive expressions like MCP (Model Context Protocol) to enable an agent-based ecosystem – they need flexible, future-proofed solutions that can align with their needs.

As Eric said, this is where the cloud is the differentiator.

“We believe that the future of AI was born in the cloud and will live there, and that customers who are on a common cloud architecture will benefit from an AI-native solution,” he explained. “To truly unlock the capabilities of anybody's AI platform, I believe we are going to see a significant shift into SaaS-based solutions next year. We’re counting on that, as a big piece of our strategy is to help marketers understand that the future of the industry lives on a born-in-the-cloud platform, because that's where the true capabilities of AI are going to be realized.”

The newest features in XM Cloud and the broader Sitecore DXP are composable, compatible, and capable of more than ever. Marketers can be more prolific with greater speed, agility, and productivity, and connect more deeply with customers. XM Cloud’s fully SaaS architecture is giving teams the ease and flexibility to adapt quickly and embrace AI-powered strategies that personalize, execute, and optimize every digital experience.

At a granular level, brand teams will also have the power to drive campaigns from concept to launch in just minutes with self-service features. This includes AI-powered briefs, tailored asset recommendations, and one-click deliverable suggestions that empower marketers to produce polished, on-brand content optimized for specific audiences and personas.

Bringing legacy along for the AI ride

AI has certainly changed the trajectory for Sitecore’s product roadmap, but so too has the introduction of XM Cloud as a force multiplier. Given the energy surrounding the new SaaS offering, there's been concern among some partners as to whether Sitecore’s legacy products would benefit from continued innovation.

As the company was rolling out Sitecore Stream – its secure, brand-aware AI platform targeted at marketers – Eric and the leadership team doubled down on their commitment to bringing everything along for the AI ride.

“Our Stream platform operates across Sitecore XM Cloud, XM and XP, Search, CDP and Personalize, and Content Hub,” he specified. “So any of the core DXP solutions are compatible with our AI plan.”

That said, Sitecore.ai is serving as a cornerstone of the company’s agentic motion. As Eric clarified, customers don’t need to be on XM Cloud – but they’ll want to be for what’s ahead.

“We built XM Cloud to solve real problems for real marketers,” he said. “Proven and ready, it’s really SaaS, really simple, and really built with agentic AI to help marketers create smarter, launch faster, and connect more meaningfully. That’s how we’re unlocking the full potential of digital to help brands turn complexity into clarity, and strategy into action.”

Proving success with leading brands and partners

From Sitecore’s perspective, the web is entering a new era – one shaped by AI and defined by smarter, more connected experiences. The promise of XM Cloud to support this evolution is already taking shape as Sitecore delivers intelligent, personalized engagement for top brands across multiple industries.

For example, Regal Rexnord, a leading manufacturer of electric motors, power transmission components, and industrial automation solutions, has launched several new digital properties on XM Cloud, accelerating its digital transformation strategy. The move has streamlined content operations, improved time to market, and established a scalable foundation for future innovation – which could presumably include AI.

Additionally, Hexagon AB, a global leader in measurement technologies, recently launched an entirely new digital expression of its refreshed brand and sharpened strategic focus built on XM Cloud. According to Josh Soffe, the company’s VP of Digital Marketing Operations & Analytics, they’re now set up to move faster, work smarter, and build on a solid foundation for AI-driven content and conversational search.

“In an agentic future where technology capability is commoditized, the real currency will be data and domain expertise.”

On the partner side, Eric said that Sitecore has been working with technology providers who operate across the stack to serve the marketer. He sees multiple opportunities for agencies to leverage Sitecore to address specific use cases within the agentic vector.

“In an agentic future where technology capability is commoditized, the real currency will be data and domain expertise,” he said. “The solutions we deliver agents for will be within the scope of our domain expertise as content marketers and content providers, and we believe that customers will need bespoke services. So we’ve created an extensible platform that our agency partners can build upon and deliver use cases on behalf of their clients or an industry.”

When it comes to those use cases, Eric has a vision for what he calls the next genetation of ABM, or agent-based modeling. This includes operations like dynamic segmentation, personalization at scale, and the targeting of key customer cohorts. Sitecore is already partnering with some shared agencies and client relationships around this initiative.

As Eric noted, “It's a way for us to bring customers and our agency partners into our innovation process.”

Improving pricing and packaging

I’ve already noted in previous articles that Sitecore partners have been bullish on XM Cloud – not just from an architectural use case perspective, but from a pricing standpoint. Several agencies have relayed to me how the product is proving to be more competitive, and that’s translating into more deals where XM Cloud is a contender.

I brought up the question of price transparency with Eric, and how Sitecore is leveraging value in a dense market of competitors. Based on recent analyst reports, some vendors in the ecosystem provide more clarity around cost, and he was quick to point out that Sitecore is steadily working to improve how it positions its pricing relative to value.

“Over the past several months, I’ve been engaged from the outside-in, looking at not just our pricing, but if we’re packaging our solutions appropriately for our market and where we believe it’s heading,” he shared. “I believe that our legacy pricing and packaging architecture is misaligned to our current segmentation and ideal customer profile, and I have seen opportunities to update our architecture, not to make us more competitive from a cost perspective, but to make us better aligned to the value that the customer experiences now and going forward.”

As Eric shared, Sitecore has realigned its packaging architecture with an emphasis on the value and impact of modernization. In his mind, this is making its overall position more competitive from a commercial perspective.

“Where I see the benefit from a cost perspective is the tremendous savings that customers are going to see, not just in taking out the legacy cost of infrastructure operations and upgrades, but by being better aligned to where their customers are headed,” he said. “That means having the opportunity to better reach and engage their audience share they’re losing every day as AI, disintermediate search traffic, social media algorithms, and ChatGPT are replacing legacy search.”

Why it matters

There’s no slowing down the AI train, and we’ve already left the agentic station.

Where do we go from here?

That’s the question marketers and brands are wrestling with – and exactly why Sitecore is seizing the opportunity to position itself as a trusted guide on the AI journey. Sitecore.ai is a welcome voice of calm amidst the chaos, focusing not just on the problems but on the potential of what’s ahead. The experience is imaginative, whimsical, and a reminder of what websites used to be: a visual portal to possibilities.

Is there a bit of theatrical hype and panache? Absolutely. And I would expect nothing less from a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer and digital leader like Eric, who knows how to capture an audience. But the stagework is balanced with substantive content in a lively and spirited way, and I’m eager to see where it grows from here. Regardless of where you are on your own trek up the AI mountain, this site is beautiful – and worth bookmarking.

In truth, this is just the latest example of how Sitecore is leading the way to AI through action. Just a few months ago, the DXP announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to launch the industry’s first AI Innovation Lab, which was keenly focused on marketers. As Sitecore’s previous CEO Dave O’Flanagan shared with me at the time, this partnership was already yielding fruit by validating AI use cases for customers.

As Eric reinforced, Sitecore's vision is to support digital experiences so powerful that they connect the world. While still new to his role as CEO, he’s laser-focused on delivering that promise by making it easier for brands to reach, engage, and serve their audiences with AI. He laid out the three strategic priorities for executing under his watch, and the agentic revolution is a key part of the mission.

“The first is to be the best agent tech platform in the industry,” he said in no uncertain terms. “The second is to continue winning with XM Cloud brands from Equifax to Hexagon, Regal Rexnord, and more. We continue to see customers adopting XM Cloud at scale, largely in response to what we believe is a market need to have a headless platform that was built for the AI era. And the third is to make AI our operating model.”

That last piece is of particular interest. Embracing AI as an operational foundation can mean a lot of things, but Eric is already executing on his vision. For example, Sitecore has set up an internal AI Council and appointed AI “champions” across the 12 major functions of its business. Microsoft is also providing a Copilot license for every employee in the company.

Additionally, Eric also said that Sitecore will be using AI internally to help drive its product evolution, something we’ve heard from major market players like Google. Helping engineers move faster could have a ripple effect on the company’s performance from an innovation and go-to-market perspective.

“In our last release, I believe 70% of the frontend code and 30% of the backend code was delivered by AI,” he shared. “It's helping us tackle big, hairy projects like the full data process and user experience integration of the Sitecore portfolio.”

As you’ll see on the Sitecore.ai website, there’s a lot ahead – and much of it will be announced at the upcoming Sitecore Symposium event in November. In the meantime, go check out this experience and do a bit of digital wandering.

Oh – and don’t get frantic about agentic. Help is here.

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Accelerating the Agentic Future: Sitecore.ai Gives Marketers an Inspiring Roadmap for Their AI Journey