My Sitecore Symposium 2025 Recap #SitecoreSYM

Sitecore Symposium 2025 is in the books and SitecoreAI is here! From high-fiving the CEO of Savana Bananas as he sprinted down the aisle, post-breakout session live band Sitecore karaoke, after-dark partners reminiscing on older days of Sitecore implementations, to high-traffic volumes sales booth hours leading to some of the most interesting Sitecore platform questions (or maybe it was the puppy pen… 🐶), there was something truly available for everyone in the magic kingdom 🏰. Please hold as it may take us a minute to rename everything from Sitecore XM Cloud to SitecoreAI 😉

Being my first Symposium trip I don't have the same baseline to compare this Symposium to as everyone else, but I've been in the game long enough (going on 14 years) to know that this years product announcements left a lasting impression and fired everyone up - I mean it's kind of hard to not be fired up after hearing Sitecore's guest speaker of the event and Savana Banana's very own Jesse Cole!

First opening night the Savana Bananas were in green uniforms because they weren't quite ripe.

Jesse's electric performance resonated with many of the hardworking Sitecore partners, the partners that have always gone the extra mile to entertain and experiment, rinse and repeat for our loyal customers. He told us countless stories of how much he has iterated, starting over, and starting all over again with the creation of the Savana Bananas - and to put it bluntly, his journey was not easy. Jesse iterated and iterated, keeping the customer at the forefront of the ever-changing changes that would define how people have to come experience his brand - not just a transaction.

One experience can change everything - so keep coming up to bat.

The Release of SitecoreAI

I mean, we all knew this was coming, right? Except we didn't exactly know how big (and real) of an integration this was going to actually be in the Platform. Let's break down this exciting announcement!

If it wasn't enough to see Eric Stine walking out to Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band, his theatric unveiling of SitecoreAI's vast integration across the platform gave way to a new era of Sitecore. Dave Tilbury, COO of Sitecore, brought us back into that monolothic headspace by announcing that the core Sitecore products will be re-integrated into the platform, and I would've been shook by that if it weren't for the fact that the experience will now be SaaS For All.

Our SaaS becomes your SaaS

That's right, all products, including Connect, CDP, Personalize, Search, Send, and Sitecore Studio will be available for customers to try out and determine if it's a product well worth investing in. Over this 6-month forecasted time range, all products will be brought into the SitecoreAI ecosystem with capabilities to extend across the full suite of products, much like we've already come to see with Page Builder, Marketplace, Analytics, and CDP data floating across to Connect and Personalize. This model truly gives us the freedom to customize SaaS to make it our own! Dave Tilbury also announced that the initial agentic modeling will be a free feature, allowing teams to bring their own agentic models to the platform.

Free you say? Let's call it Entry-level access. Every SitecoreAI deal includes XM Cloud as the foundation, entry-level access to CDP & Personalize, Search, and DAM, and unlimited Sitecore-built AI use cases. Customers only pay when usage grows beyond included tiers. There are no forced bundles or migration costs. One note around "builder seats" was also thrown out as part of the base package, of which I assume means for building agents in Agentic Studio.

Current XMC customers who have not signed the AI Addendum will still receive SitecoreAI, but without AI features enabled. They will be directed to the Customer Portal to review and sign the addendum in order to activate AI capabilities. There is no new pricing conversation required. The upgrade to SitecoreAI is included within their existing entitlements at no additional cost.

SitecoreAI Core Features

SitecoreAI is based on 4 core features: Agentic Studio, App Studio, Marketplace, and Sitecore Connect, all part of the Sitecore Studio umbrella. I'll provide a brief overview of these offerings:

• Agentic Studio: engineer your own agentic workflows with actions, agents, signals (research insights), all in a flow-type canvas. I see this as Sitecore's platform solve for the AI "Human interaction in the loop" problem where AI hallucination can quickly reduce the quality and accuracy of generated output per iteration of AI involvement.
  • A "Spaces" whiteboard experience will be part of Agentic Studio, a new concept that steps away from marketers needing to use Chat-GPT or other LLM models outside of the CMS content channel. I have high hopes for this area to be a very collaborative space for content authors workflow demands and bringing certain pieces of work into one single experience.
• App Studio: build custom apps, extensions, and AI agents into the platform using APIs, SDKs, and MCP (MCP is seeing it's golden hour!)
• Marketplace: the tried and true way of building custom-code extension points onto the SitecoreAI platform, whether its within page builder at the field-level or as a full app page in the portal under different contexts.
• Sitecore Connect: a growing library of connectors to other connection points by allowing development teams to integrate their tech stack with prebuilt connectors and "recipes".

Session Recaps

Future Previews

• Static personalization to component level personalization directly in page builder
• Search tooling directly in SitecoreAI that brings intelligence into your digital properties
• Hyper personalized discovery with answer engine optimizations

SitecoreAI release Previews

• Campaign management will make all Sitecore content available within a single channel view
• Sitecore custom agents via Agentic Studio will be available directly from the canvas experience
• AI prompting via Agentic Studio will allow the creation of agent workflows

Session Details

The breakout sessions were immensely helpful to get a headstart on the SitecoreAI pre-release. Sitecore previewed a plethora of ongoing and upcoming features related to AI and product enhancements, including the personal live Marketplace Hackerspace sessions held by Sitecore's Sebastian Winter. I was lucky enough to snag one of the 10-per-session spots to get a first-hand experience into developing a Marketplace extension point of my own idea:

The Sitecore solutions area not only housed the partner booths, but live demos of SitecoreAI capabilities before the launch. I must've spent what felt like an hour at one of the product demo booths looking over the Agentic Studio features, including the drag and drop canvas for creating an agent workflow:

At another product demo booth, the SitecoreAI team showcased the Components section of the previous Design Library area, which now incorporates the development team's actual React components in a Design Library view with the ability to see the exported React code with variants! I actually don't even know if I was supposed to see that part as it was stated as a WIP, but this is going to be a game changer for no-code/low-code solutions:

In a SitecoreAI optimizations session, the team discussed GraphQL performance optimizations and best practices. There's many layers to where a performance bottleneck can occur within the GraphQL requests flow from Experience Edge back to the end-user - I was surprised to hear that even a network's VPN going from region to region increased the ingress latency by over 13 seconds:

In the same session, the team provided a sneak peek into upcoming Publishing service advancements and how the current Publishing GUI will grow based on a new Publishing algorithm that will bring incredible performance gains for content to market (think Publishing Service 7.0 on SaaS model with even more speed):

And of course the sessions wouldn't be complete without talks on AI with Rapid Development. I had a chance to sit in on a session that discussed bridging the gap between multiple systems - JIRA, Figma, and SitecoreAI. Using AI techniques of MCP and RAG, we can use MCP to execute contextual APIs that LLMs can understand (querying JIRA tickets and Figma Designs) and use RAG to generate code-base context all to bring together a rapid development experience in our IDE (Cursor / VSCode) for Sitecore development of componentry and features.

I see a bright, unified, and open future for SitecoreAI. Extensibility has always been one of my main concerns working with clients who have switched to the SaaS model, and at the heart of SitecoreAI is a promising initiative for customers to bring their business ideas and experiences into Sitecore with way less friction.