There’s ROI. And then there’s RO High.

Sitecore is feeling the latter with its XM Cloud platform, and they’ve got some compelling numbers to back it up.

The digital experience leader just unveiled findings from a commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact study. According to the research, the return on investment from its market-blazing XM Cloud platform is adding up to a staggering 371% over three years.

Talk about a “Big Bang” moment. It’s a bona fide ROI explosion for the company’s SaaS-native solution, which has become its fastest-growing product ever. Earlier this year, the company reported 100% growth of the AI-powered, cloud-based platform – and things don’t seem to be slowing down.

When I spoke to CEO Eric Stine in July at Sitecore’s Sales Kick Off (SKO), he described XM Cloud as a gateway to agentic AI. While Sitecore is continuing to support its legacy platform customers along the AI frontier, Sitecore's agentic vision (elegantly detailed on its Sitecore.ai website) is inspiring organizations to join their cloud journey – and they’re stepping up to make the leap even easier.

Eric Stine, CEO of Sitecore

“We are at a transformative moment in marketing as a function and technology as an industry right now,” Eric said, explaining how partners like American Eagle and Altudo are accelerating migration to tap the AI potential.

In fact, Altudo's CEO Rahul Khosla said its FastLane accelerator has cut implementation costs and timelines by up to 50%, helping them close more XM Cloud deals than any other partner this year. It's one key reason why Altudo received Sitecore’s coveted XM Cloud Hero Award, recognizing them as the number one partner for XM Cloud globally.

Rahul Khosla, CEO of Altudo

SKO was ground zero for some major announcements along the AI horizon, including the promise of true hyper-personalization. Front and center was its partnership with Gradial – a platform that integrates with XM Cloud and Content Hub to provide an agent-powered “ops team” that helps marketers write copy, build pages, tag assets, run QA, check compliance, and scale the delivery of dynamic, personalized digital experiences.

As Eric explained to me, Gradial has been a dynamic find and an incredible fit for Sitecore. For its part, Gradial has already been disrupting the agentic marketing space this year, starting with a $13 million investment raise in March to drive its intelligent agent ecosystem.

“Gradial brings a unique blend of engineering precision and marketing empathy,” Eric said. “Together, we’re helping marketers move faster and smarter, using AI to transform delivery and stay anchored in creativity and brand purpose.”

Partners are already helping to shepherd the transformational value of XM Cloud and Gradial, and Sitecore sees real opportunity for them to realize more revenue – especially at a time when agencies are struggling to adapt to AI’s impact on traditional services. In my conversations with several shops that attended Sitecore’s SKO, the Gradial announcement seemed to light a fire of enthusiasm.

Dave Tilbury, COO of Sitecore

Dave Tilbury, Chief Operating Officer at Sitecore, told me that Sitecore’s channel partners are demonstrating the broad potential of where AI can lead – and the winners will guide customers through critical challenges as they build new kinds of AI-first experiences powered by XM Cloud.

“Partners can add value on the migration journey,” he said. “They can do it on the change management journey. They can bring competency around governance, security, and compliance. So I think the excitement that I've certainly seen [from partners] has been that the product is great, and the vision is great. We can see multiple threads as to how they can make money from doing this. Essentially, it's not just who sells the most, but who brings the client on that journey.”

Moving beyond ‘bolt-on’ AI to truly agentic capabilities

While XM Cloud was launched several years ago, it continues to reinforce its value as the foundation of Sitecore’s digital experience platform – uniting content, data, and AI to deliver fast, relevant, and engaging customer experiences.

At the same time, XM Cloud incorporates the rich functionality, usability, and agility that content creators demand from their CMS platforms. Having test-driven it multiple times, it’s an intuitive evolution of Sitecore’s legacy expertise in software experience and delivery, and it’s no wonder that it was recently named “Best Content Management Platform” in the 2025 MarTech Breakthrough Awards.

That part about being fast is key. Brands simply can’t afford to wait, and XM Cloud accelerates the pace at which marketing and digital teams can move from an idea to execution, and turn compelling content into commercial outcomes with precision, speed, and agility.

But the real game changer is agentic AI, which is taking the industry by storm. According to GlobalData’s latest Strategic Intelligence report, the agentic AI ecosystem – which includes software companies that offer agentic frameworks, software platforms, and agentic tools – will take business and industrial automation to new heights and play a central role in the digital transformation of enterprise systems to AI-native stacks.

Sitecore has been steadily innovating in AI and machine learning for many years, from its pioneering Cortex Processing Engine to its newly integrated, DXP-wide Sitecore Stream solution. Designed to support the transformative impacts of agentic AI on marketing and technology, Sitecore has evolved beyond simple, “bolt-on” AI features to embrace truly embedded agentic AI. The goal: empower marketers to shift from managing tasks to achieving business goals by tapping AI’s capacity to understand intent and automate processes like never before.

Sitecore has taken a strong position in the AI era, building on its foundation and leveraging its community and partner resources to scale solutions quickly. They’ve also been thoughtful about its application, giving Stream an opportunity to flourish within its DXP ecosystem while working with partners to understand the impacts – and where to optimize.

Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO of Sitecore

XM Cloud has become a sort of fulcrum for unleashing the next wave of agentic capabilities. But like any tool, it requires intelligent strategy and application. As Sitecore’s Chief Marketing Officer Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek said, the winning brands won’t be the ones who use AI the most, but those who use it best.

“XM Cloud is a strategic growth engine for digital marketers at a time when customer journeys are rapidly evolving,” she observed. And it’s doing that with real-time personalization across channels, brands, and regions, moving beyond static segments to respond instantly to behavioral signals.

Armed with its configurable agentic workflows, Sitecore is evolving modern marketing to become more adaptive and contextual. This allows marketing teams to launch campaigns faster and continuously optimize their performance – and that translates into success.

Proof points: Forrester TEI Study

As mentioned, Sitecore commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to analyze the potential ROI that enterprises might achieve when deploying XM Cloud. The purpose, of course, was to give CMS buyers – and the market at large – a framework for evaluating the potential financial impact of XM Cloud.

Here's some additional context regarding the methodology: Forrester interviewed nine decision-makers with experience using XM Cloud, aggregated their feedback, and combined the results into a single composite organization that represents a midmarket, B2B2C, global organization with 2,000 employees and $500 million in annual revenue.

Before deploying XM Cloud, the participants faced a range of significant challenges that impacted their ability to deliver modern digital experiences. They were coping with legacy or fragmented CMS environments, operational silos, and slow content delivery, which made marketing teams heavily reliant on developers for even basic updates. Technical issues, wrestling matches with complexity, and other persistent problems dragged on performance.

According to the study, XM Cloud had a profound and transformative impact on almost every facet of their digital operations. By shifting to a unified, cloud-native platform, they accelerated content delivery, empowered non-technical users, and significantly reduced reliance on IT for routine updates.

On the AI side, XM Cloud also delivered the goods. Its integrated brand-aware AI, copilots, intuitive editing tools, agentic workflows, and seamless integrations enabled faster campaign launches, enhanced personalization, and improved collaboration between marketing and development teams. These capabilities translated into measurable gains in productivity and digital revenue while also lowering infrastructure and maintenance costs.

From a key statistics perspective, it's hard to beat a 371% ROI over three years. Forrester also calculated that over the same time period, organizations could expect an incremental revenue benefit of $2.1 million from XM Cloud, and cost savings of $470,700 by eliminating self-hosted legacy solutions.

At a website performance level, the study also noted a 50% improvement in digital conversions as marketers were now able to accelerate content deployment and personalize experiences with greater precision, closing the gap between content and commerce. And by leveraging XM Cloud’s fully SaaS architecture, organizations could streamline content integration and new feature deployment – and save up to 40% in time.

As one study participant noted, their company’s conversion improvements are translating into real dollars. After upgrading their website's visuals and performance with XM Cloud, they experienced a whopping 60% month-over-month increase in add-to-cart actions. Not too shabby.

If you’re interested in digging into more of the methodology and results, you can check out the complete study here.

Why it matters

I’ve been covering the rise of XM Cloud since its launch, and it’s clearly reshaping the landscape. In my discussions with agencies, pricing transparency and TCO have made it more attractive in deals where Sitecore might have previously been too expensive. That’s a credit to the company’s efforts to cultivate strong customer intimacy and improve its go-to-market strategy.

There's always a tendency to take a commissioned analyst study with a grain of salt, but the metrics in this Forrester report reflect some of the general energy I've been feeling from both the agency and customer sides of the market. The one-on-one interviews also provided some excellent insights that demonstrate the impacts of XM Cloud on tangible use cases. Like anything else, the real proof rests with customer outcomes.

Sitecore has also been markedly more aggressive as it charges into agentic AI with a real frothiness – and XM Cloud is at the center of that. From an ecosystem perspective, the journey to be a leading DXP in the AI race began in force with Stream, but the agent focus is having a profound impact on how the company is defining the roadmap for what it calls an “Agentic Experience Platform."

It's hard not to be consumed by the marketing messages and flashy signals during this period of upheaval. Many platforms are rabidly rebranding and even “AI Washing” their offerings to compete on the frontier. But Sitecore has invested vertically and horizontally on a more evolutionary scale, and its products reflect that robustness and confidence.

David San Filippo, SVP of Digital Content and Experience at Altudo, recently penned an article on CMS Critic about DXPs and their agentic AI readiness. In his analysis, he noted how Sitecore has repositioned to embrace its agentic ambitions, observing how its tools aren’t just designed for delivery, but as a system of intelligent orchestration. This is paid off via Stream and its brand-aware foundational AI capabilities, as well as the advent of the Gradial partnership.

I asked Eric about XM Cloud and Sitecore’s broader DXP ecosystem, which is built on a foundation of trust. The company has invested deeply in governance and compliance to enable organizations with the kinds of controls they require to do business at a global scale, from HIPAA to GDPR. That’s helping to ground the revolutionary features of agentic AI and bridge the gaps surrounding real value – especially at a time when many AI features aren’t delivering as expected.

“In Sitecore, our responsibility is to help you shorten the distance between content and commerce,” Eric said, “By delivering the content to the audience that you know is there for it and converting them with something compelling as quickly as possible. That's why our use cases for our agentic platform are focused on context-aware content. Content is our domain expertise.”

There’s a lot of noise in the agentic corridor right now as companies swoon over MCP servers and custom agent ecosystems. Cutting through the chaos is the key, and this is where Sitecore has a distinct advantage with its global community. As I witnessed at SKO this summer, Eric’s team is working to translate the roadmap for builders, MVPs, and partners, so they can become the ambassadors for success.

Agencies, too, need to be inspired about what’s ahead – and not mired in the gloom of AI displacement and disruption. This is where Sitecore's vision and leadership have been shining.

A 371% ROI is a high benchmark for any customer. But Sitecore's real ROI is the return on innovation with its people, products, and processes. And by the looks of it, there could be another “Big Bang” on the horizon.

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Big Bang ROI: Sitecore XM Cloud Delivers 371% Return on Investment as it Powers the Agentic Future