It’s been a couple of weeks since I got home from the 2024 Sitecore Symposium and I am still floating on that amazing mix of exhaustion and excitement that comes after a really excellent tech conference. AgencyQ was a bronze sponsor this year and I joined my colleagues in greeting and chatting with current, new, and soon-to-be clients. I always love the interaction with so many interesting and smart people, but I have to say that what really got me energized at Symposium were the product announcements and the obvious refresh the new leadership is bringing to the roadmap and vision at Sitecore.
Key Announcements
Sitecore Stream might be Sitecore’s most exciting product launch ever. The fundamental capabilities showcased in the CEO keynote are just the tip of the iceberg. Sitecore Stream’s brand-aware, generative AI will be leveraged across the Sitecore Content Cloud to support scalable, efficient marketing processes at every stage of the execution lifecycle. We fully expect Sitecore Stream—with its AI-enhanced content workflows and generative copilots—to be an absolute game changer. This is much more than just another generative AI tool: Welcome to the era of the Intelligent DXP.
Just as exciting, I anticipate that we'll soon see AI capabilities built directly into CDP, enabling marketers, data scientists, UX experts, and all the rest of us to automatically identify customer behavior patterns and uncover deeper insights from the data. This could significantly enhance personalization efforts by recognizing trends and preferences that might otherwise go unnoticed, allowing for more targeted and effective engagement strategies.
Another great theme of this year’s Symposium sessions and keynotes was continued commitment to the XP platform. I was very excited to see that the new Stream capabilities will be available in XP from the start and to hear repeatedly that Sitecore remains committed to the platform. While, like many, we believe that fully composable cloud-native SaaS capabilities are the future of the DXP space, it simply isn’t the right fit for all implementations. Hearing repeatedly that Sitecore leadership wants to give customers the “power to choose” the architecture that is right for them is very promising.
Additionally, it was announced that many Sitecore products have achieved HIPAA readiness attestation from an independent auditor. This includes XM Cloud, Content Hub, and CDP / Personalize. This is certainly a huge and welcome advancement for Sitecore deployment in healthcare-related industries. But further, it demonstrated both the commitment and readiness of the platform to meaningfully address PHI/PII privacy considerations. Since HIPAA is amongst the gold-standards of data protection, the foundational security verification demonstrated by this validation will have far reaching impacts for all Sitecore implementations having high security and privacy compliance requirements.
Future Roadmap
The state of Sitecore looks very promising. It would seem that the recent revamp in leadership is supporting strong innovation in impactful directions. Sitecore is making strong and thoughtful inroads into not just generative AI capabilities, but also for insights and execution. Sophisticated martech stacks will continue to move in the direction of simplicity to achieve scalability, and AI is going to have to be a major part of that evolution.
Conclusion
It was amazing to see the strong and vibrant community of developers, architects, and enterprises/businesses/users that continue to thrive around the Sitecore platform and we’re all excited to see where we go from here.
