Bill Rogers is, in my opinion, statue-worthy. He's a revered icon among the contentelligentsia, and his place is firmly cemented in the long arc of CMS history.

If you’re not familiar with the lore, Bill founded a little company called Ektron back in 1998. Like all great Silicon Valley tales, it happened in the basement of his house in Hollis, New Hampshire – slightly East of Palo Alto.

No matter. Genius often comes from unexpected places. At that time, the internet was boiling everywhere with possibility, and Bill saw the future a little closer to Fenway.

“In the late nineties, it was becoming apparent to me that the Web was going to dramatically impact how everyone did business,” he recalled. “With that realization in mind, I started Ektron with the idea of eventually building an operating system for the Web, to empower business people to be able to effectively manage their Web presence.”

It was an idea with legs – and under Bill’s leadership, Ektron followed that vector, blossoming into a pioneering SaaS CMS with hundreds of employees and thousands of customers.

After selling to Accel KKR, Ektron merged with Episerver in 2015. The company rapidly scaled and consumed Optimizely, rebranding under that mantle. Today, it’s one of the leading platforms on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for DXPs. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Except it’s not. Because Bill Rogers isn’t even close to finished. And when he has an idea, we should all pay attention.

As generative AI roared onto the scene in 2023, Bill once again saw the future. He co-founded an outfit called Orbita, which uses conversational AI and virtual assistants to help healthcare organizations engage patients, improve outcomes, and reduce costs.

Seeing the power and potential of these new technologies – and given his deep wisdom accrued from years in the CMS ecosystem – he saw an opportunity to build conversational experiences with website visitors using AI-powered search and chatbots.

Enter ai12z (that’s “AI 1 to Z”): An incredibly simple yet powerful solution for transforming a website or mobile app with an intelligent AI assistant. The platform has been rolling since last year, enabling users to build generative AI-powered copilots that effectively activate the voice of your brand across every digital interaction.

ai12z’s assistants can take a familiar form on a website (think search bars or those ubiquitous chatbots at the bottom left of the experience). But behind the scenes, it’s reinventing how users navigate content, engage, and convert – allowing brands and organizations to activate more conversational customer support, personalize answers with multilingual and multichannel capabilities, and leverage copilots to assist in task completion.

The applications for richer engagement are almost endless. With ai12z’s Image AI, visitors can be served image-based information to bring answers to life in more visual ways. E-Commerce sites can provide users with product comparisons by asking a chatbot to list options side by side. Lead forms can be elevated to a dynamic level based on a prospect’s chat questions.

ai12z also offers secure integrations with a host of enterprise applications, allowing brands to personalize the UX by linking to content repos and facilitating tight controls with chatbot management and escalation.

Now, ai12z is partnering with Progress Sitefinity – a leading digital experience platform with a best-of-breed web CMS – to help brands and customers improve how visitors find information, move around websites, and more. ai12z also provides seamless CMS synchronization, making the connection to content management simple, fluid, and almost second nature.

Of course, that makes sense given the company’s leadership and its embedded CMS heritage. As ai12z's co-founder and CMO Nicole Rogers told me (she was once an employee of Ektron), the web experience is baked into their collective DNA.

“When Bill was creating Ektron, he wanted every non-technical user to be able to manage their website,” she said. “We believe that moving forward, a website is going to be a holding space for a digital assistant. So when you're interacting with a brand, you're going to ask that digital assistant questions. It will essentially become your personal AI assistant, almost like a personal concierge.”

Evolving CX with AI agents

Search has long been an afterthought on websites. Only in recent years has it become a stronger preference for visitors, due in no small part to the advent of AI and improvements in the overall search experience.

With this shift in behavior, we’re now seeing anywhere between 10% and 30% of website visitors opting for the search bar – and with e-commerce sites, that figure is closer to 43%. What’s more: site searchers are two to three times more likely to convert.

Many CMS platforms have struggled with their own search, relying on traditional Boolean services or third-party tools that provide things like predictive typing or other light features. Still, users frequently hit the wall with the limitations of exact keywords that don’t yield good results. Chatbots have positioned themselves as a salve to this wound, but most are simply rules-based decision trees that can’t handle complex questions.

A big part of overcoming these hurdles rests with AI agents, which are all the rage. These handy tools enable ai12z users to leverage its AI reasoning engine and out-of-the-box agents from its toolkit to initiate workflows or complete tasks. This can be anything from composing and sending emails and SMS text messages to providing weather forecasts or custom data parsing based on unique use cases.

Adding new agents is actually quite simple and streamlined, and allows for a lot of flexibility with respect to adding custom functions and selecting which data sources to tap.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: ai12z

As Nicole pointed out, the evolving role of agents will have a profound impact on a wide range of industry-specific use cases – ones where basic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is useful for knowledge-based questions but falls short of the high-value actions that AI can deliver. She gave an example in higher education that illustrates the real potential.

“Let's say you have a student who is interacting with a digital assistant that acts as a guidance counselor, and they're trying to figure out what courses should they take for next semester,” she described. “That digital assistant will call different agents, like, ‘What is the course calendar’ agent, and ‘What is the student CRM’ agent. If the student is majoring in marketing, it knows what courses they’ve taken, figures out what courses are still required, and comes up with the courses they need to take. Then, it personalizes the response back to that student.”

It's easy to see how this can expand into a myriad of industry-specific applications, from users opening support tickets to booking a reservation at a resort in Montego Bay.

ai12z’s AI reasoning engine also makes the agent experience an easier lift for marketers and developers. There’s no need to write any code to figure out when to call one agent versus another. The AI reasoning engine in the digital assistant knows what agents are available to it, and based on what the user asks, it can initiate an agentic workflow where it can call multiple agents in order to accomplish specific tasks for the user.

Making AI progress with a DXP integration

With the ai12z partnership, Progress Sitefinity users can take their search to the next level. By adding generative AI-powered search and chat, they can deliver accurate results, translate intent, and truly enable users to accomplish what they came to do – whether it’s finding information, booking a service, or making a purchase.

It can also improve conversions by helping visitors find relevant options, compare choices, and take the next step – like signing up, making a purchase, or booking an appointment.

As Progress Sitefinity customers enhance their websites with AI-powered search and chatbots, they can mitigate a visitor's frustration with using outdated search tools or rigid, pre-ordained chatbot scripts. They can deploy AI assistants that understand visitor intent, deliver relevant content, and guide users toward the next step of their customer journey.

Guardrails have often been a challenge when leveraging GenAI, but modern tools like ai12z are able to overcome these limitations with focused training. Using the Progress Sitefinity CMS Connector, organizations can sync their existing content with ai12z and pull from approved content. This ensures that AI-generated responses are accurate, relevant, and fully aligned with a brand’s messaging.

With ai12z’s agents, brands will also have access to real-time data by connecting their AI search and chatbots to enterprise systems like CRMs, scheduling platforms, and inventory databases.

In terms of the granular features, the aforementioned Image AI can provide search results and chatbot responses that include relevant images – delivering a more visually engaging experience.

Source: ai12z

AI can also display call-to-action buttons like “Book Now,” “Request a Demo,” or “Sign Up” to guide users toward key conversions.

A screenshot of a chat

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: ai12z

I already mentioned the comparisons capability, which is super slick – and a perfect use case for e-commerce or transactional websites. Users can ask the AI assistant to compare products, services, or plans, making it easier for a visitor to evaluate options and take action. Chatbots can even present dynamic forms for event registrations, service requests, or lead generation.

Multilingual support is also a big one. With AI search, Progress Sitefinity users can serve a more diverse global market with AI that understands and responds in multiple languages, ensuring accessibility for broader audiences.

Pricing

ai12z’s pricing is based on question volume, and is fairly straightforward. It does offer a free Starter instance for one project for 30 days, and it has a cap on the number of interactions. Support is included, but I’ve checked out the documentation, and it’s solid (what else would you expect from former CMS builders and practitioners?)

The Volume Pricing tier is where the transparency begins. You can have multiple projects in your instance, and they provide a baseline of expectations, ranging from $500 for just over 20,000 questions to $25,000 for over a million. There are some additional costs, but I would recommend contacting them for additional details.

There’s also a partner level with a few benefits. You can find all of the bits and pieces on the company’s pricing page.

The Verdict

ai12z is like an ultra-refined AI fuel additive for your experience engine. It simplifies a lot of the complexity associated with onboarding AI-powered search and chabot features, making it much more attainable.

With this new partnership, Progress Sitefinity customers can hit the ground running and rapidly modernize their websites with AI-driven engagement tools. Not only will they be able to enhance search, but they can also automate support and help brands drive more conversions by answering questions and activating the customer experience.

One of the key benefits of ai12z is the ease of deployment. When Rob Yelle, the company’s Global Client & Partner Enablement Director, told me it could be set up in about a day, I was skeptical. But then he actually did it with our CMS Critic website on the fly, showing me firsthand how quickly the prompts and data features could be used.

Source: ai12z

There are also some spicy analytics in the backend that give you an overview of the likes and dislikes of answers, as well as a snapshot of the questions that were asked to the chatbot over a specific period of time.

“People think, it can't possibly be that easy,” Rob said gleefully. “You can't possibly come through and help an existing website that quickly. So that's what we do on our POCs. We show people, we ingest their site, we do some work, then we start getting deeper. And then people fantasize about everything it can do. But immediately it can just do this stuff out of the box.”

AI is raising some key concerns around security and privacy. But leave it to Bill Rogers to be proactive in this area: ai12z is built with enterprise-grade security, transparency, and control to help businesses deploy AI search and chat solutions that deliver real confidence. That means going beyond data encryption and permissioning to help organizations achieve global data regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more. They’re also committed to deep testing and continuous learning.

While this new partnership aims to deliver value to Progress Sitefinity customers, it’s worth noting that ai12z is working with a growing bench of technologies in many categories. The company sports connectors for various tools, including a myriad of CMS platforms, content repos like Google Drive and Dropbox, and more.

Bill and team have created something really impressive, and it makes the journey to meaningful AI features so much easier. The UX is sleek and lightweight, and everything feels like it’s within reach. Regardless of where you are on your journey, give this tool a closer look.

Looking for guidance on ai12z? Talk to an expert.

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Accelerating AI progress: ai12z brings powerful AI search and chatbots to Progress Sitefinity