AI agents that manage marketing workflows, virtual teammates that monitor performance, and experimentation that can increasingly optimise itself. Optimizely is making some significant changes to its platform, and organisations already using its technology have plenty to think about!
At Opticon London 2026, the direction was unmistakable. Optimizely wants AI to take on more of the work involved in creating, managing, and improving digital experiences, with its newly-named Optimizely Agent Platform playing a central role.
For customers, these developments present some interesting opportunities. They could help reduce the time spent on routine activities, increase the amount of experimentation teams can undertake, and improve how organisations manage content and customer experiences. The commercial benefits will depend on which capabilities customers adopt, how they use them, and whether their existing implementations can support them.
The DotCentric team was at Opticon to explore the announcements, hear from Optimizely's specialists, and speak with customers and partners. We've picked out five developments that deserve attention, including what they could mean for organisations already using the platform.
1. The Optimizely Agent Platform
One of the most significant developments is the evolution of Optimizely's AI offering into the Optimizely Agent Platform. Alongside it sits Mark, the AI assistant experience, while the announced Mark-1 family of models is designed specifically for marketing tasks.
The Agent Platform brings together AI agents, tools, data, and workflows, allowing organisations to automate activities that currently require multiple systems or significant manual involvement. Rather than asking an AI assistant to complete an isolated task, teams can build processes in which agents carry out connected activities, using relevant information and working within defined controls.
For marketing teams needing to prepare product information, create campaign content, adapt it for different channels, manage approvals, and coordinate publication across several websites, agent-based workflows could support multiple stages of the process, reduce repetitive work, and help deliver campaigns more efficiently.
The Optimizely Agent Platform can also support reporting, analysis, experimentation, and other activities where teams currently spend time moving between applications or coordinating tasks manually.
DotCentric is actually one of the few Optimizely partners in the UK that has achieved Optimizely Agent Platform Specialized Partner status, formally recognising our ability to develop and extend AI agents, tools, and workflows within the Optimizely ecosystem.
2. Virtual Teammates
One of the more interesting developments highlighted at Opticon was Virtual Teammates, AI-powered co-workers designed to manage ongoing responsibilities rather than individual requests.
The initial roles include a Chief of Staff, Marketing Analyst, SEO & AI Search Analyst, Personalization Strategist, and CRO Manager. Each is designed to work with relevant organisational information, carry out defined activities, and support teams over time.
The potential is particularly interesting for organisations with ambitious marketing plans but limited capacity to deliver. Reporting, competitor monitoring, performance analysis, and identifying opportunities for improvement, all require regular attention, but they can easily slip down the priority list when teams are busy delivering campaigns.
A Marketing Analyst virtual teammate, for example, could provide regular analysis of website performance, while a CRO Manager virtual teammate could help identify and investigate opportunities for experimentation.
For Optimizely customers, there's an opportunity to examine where recurring activities consume resources and whether a Virtual Teammate could make those processes more effective. The strongest applications are likely to be those with a defined responsibility, measurable outcomes, and access to reliable information.
3. Experimentation and personalisation
Experimentation and personalisation have been central to Optimizely's offering for years. The latest developments point towards AI taking on more responsibility for identifying opportunities, supporting the creation of experiences, analysing results, and improving performance.
For organisations with established experimentation programmes, AI could help accelerate things, making it possible to investigate more opportunities and reduce the administrative burden on optimisation teams. It can also make it easier to deliver more relevant experiences to different audiences without having to create and maintain every variation manually.
4. AI search
AI-powered search and assistants are changing how customers research products, compare services, and find information. This means it’s important to know how easily AI systems can discover, interpret, and accurately represent your content.
Optimizely's new developments include Agent Visibility Analytics, and work to support agent-ready digital experiences. These capabilities are intended to help organisations understand how their brands and content appear in AI-driven discovery and identify opportunities to improve their visibility.
For businesses with complex products or services, the implications are particularly significant. A manufacturer may have thousands of products, each with detailed specifications, compatibility information, technical documents, and different purchasing options. Customers need accurate information to make informed decisions, and AI assistants attempting to recommend products depend on access to that same information.
If specifications are incomplete, product descriptions are inconsistent, or important information is buried in documents that are difficult to interpret, AI systems may struggle to identify suitable products or provide accurate recommendations. The same problems can affect customers navigating the website directly, but AI-driven discovery introduces another way in which poor information can influence commercial outcomes.
For Optimizely customers, this makes content quality, structure, and accessibility worth examining. It's also an opportunity to consider whether existing CMS implementations and product information systems make it easy to maintain accurate, consistent information across different channels.
Agent Visibility Analytics and related capabilities could provide useful information about AI-driven discovery, but improving visibility may require changes to the content and systems behind it.
5. Agentic content management
Managing content across a large website is rarely straightforward. Organisations operating multiple brands, markets, or languages often have complicated processes for creating, reviewing, approving, publishing, and maintaining information, with several teams involved at different stages.
Optimizely's developments in agentic content management could automate more of these activities, including content preparation, categorisation, and workflow coordination. For organisations managing substantial volumes of content, that could reduce the time spent on routine administration and help teams publish and maintain information more efficiently.
There are obvious applications for organisations with large product catalogues, extensive resource libraries, or websites serving several different audiences. Content teams could potentially spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time improving the information and experiences available to customers.
What should Optimizely customers do now?
The announcements at Opticon London demonstrate the scale of Optimizely's investment in AI and the direction its platform is taking. There are opportunities to improve productivity, expand experimentation, strengthen personalisation, and make digital operations more efficient.
But the priorities will vary between organisations. A business already running an established experimentation programme may be well placed to explore more advanced optimisation capabilities. Another organisation might see greater value in reducing the time spent managing content or improving the quality of information used across its digital channels. For some, the priority may be getting more from the Optimizely products they already own before introducing anything new.
We'd encourage customers to focus on three areas:
1. Review how effectively you're using Optimizely today. Identify opportunities to improve performance, address limitations, and make better use of existing functionality.
2. Prioritise capabilities that address a commercial need. Whether the objective is reducing costs, increasing conversion, improving customer experiences, or saving time, establish what success would look like before investing in new technology.
3. Understand your requirements for adoption. Confirm what's available now, what's still being developed, and what your existing implementation needs to support it. Licensing, integrations, data quality, and internal processes will all influence the options available.
It's also worth involving both marketing and technical teams in these discussions. Many of the new capabilities will affect how people work across different systems, and decisions about automation, governance, and implementation will need input from both sides.
Making the most of what's coming
Opticon London provided plenty of reasons for existing customers to take another look at what's possible with Optimizely. The Agent Platform, Virtual Teammates, and developments across experimentation, personalisation, search, and content management could create valuable opportunities, particularly for organisations ready to make greater use of AI across their digital operations.
At DotCentric, we help organisations improve their Optimizely implementations, make better use of existing functionality, and introduce new capabilities where they can deliver measurable results. Our team includes Platinum Optimizely MVPs with specialist knowledge of the platform, giving customers access to technical expertise and practical advice on how to approach these new developments.
If you'd like to understand what the latest Optimizely announcements mean for your organisation, talk to us. We can review your current implementation, identify opportunities to improve performance, and help you decide which new capabilities are worth exploring and what it would take to introduce them.
