We’re living in the world beyond the website. This was the central enduring statement made by Eric Stine in his role as chief executive officer at Sitecore. As a digital experience platform for marketers and software application developers with AI-centric content services and tools, Stine’s point comes from the biting reality that traditional websites and equally traditional search methods are now being surpassed by social channels, AI-search and a new era of meta-level information designed to draw us towards brands, products and services. As we now enter the world beyond the website, what technologies will underpin and facilitate this evolution?
First, let’s cover some important three-letter acronyms (TLAs). Sitecore is known for its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and the company is recognised for its Digital Asset Management (DAM), Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Content Management Platform (CMP) tools.
“Discovery is no longer driven by search; it’s powered by attention. Brands earn that attention in social media feeds and AI-generated summaries when they show up in the right moment with the right message. SitecoreAI gives marketers the platform to do exactly that, creating personalised experiences through a toolset that learns as they work and helps them stay ahead of what’s next,” said Stine, speaking at his company’s annual Sitecore Symposium convention in Orlando, Florida this month.
A new product launch this winter and designed to enable digital experience DXP gurus with all the AI they can eat, SitecoreAI is a composable SaaS platform featuring the company’s new Agentic Studio with ready-made AI agents that help power real-time marketing personalisation, engagement and conversion across all digital channels i.e. mobile, desktop, kiosk computers, connected TV etc.
The shift from static search
Designed to put AI at the centre of digital marketing work, SitecoreAI champions its ability to move with the new marketing cadence that sees customer journeys shift from static search to AI-driven discovery. As such, this technology helps brands move with their audiences in real-time. The platform launches with more than 20 AI agents delivered out of the box, available immediately and at no extra cost, with hundreds more expected to be available in the coming months, many of which will be built by an active ecosystem of partners and customers.
Speaking at a ‘day zero’ press and analyst meeting in advanced of the show proper, Sitecore chief product officer Roger Connolly explained that it’s clear who much marketers are feeling pressure both internally (from budgets) and externally (from the market itself), so… “The last thing they need is more tools, so we have realised that we need to bring our capabilities closer together. Given the fact that we have made some acquisitions in recent times, we realised that we needed to move forward to provide a more ‘connected stack’. This is why SitecoreAI is an amalgam of every one of our capabilities in a single platform – all under a single license,” he said.
Sitecore Agentic Studio Builder also comes into play here. This technology has out-of-the-box agents that are contextually aware of a customer’s brand and content.
Some of that “brand content” could be structured database elements, some of it could be more unstructured info from a firm’s website and social media interactions, which may be channelled through a vector database once the correct taxonomy is decided upon for all the elements being fed to the agents.
Realigning online presences
Plenary session speakers during this event’s keynote used their opening address to detail more of the work carried out across the Sitecore platform. After thanking sponsors, partners and his own staff, CEO Stine talked about his journey through the creative arts industry.
“Social has played its part and we’ve spent ages optimising our home pages for a good web experience that resonate with the most popular platforms… but then, ChatGPT came along and so we now need to reconnect the pipelines that we already have so that customers get answers to the questions they want answered,” said Stines, in reference to the way organisations now have to realign their online presence for the need to breed of platforms we are all intersecting with. “When the demographics of a market detail the fact that you’re more likely to reach a market through AI summaries, it demands specific reformatting… and trying to stitch all that content together in an organic, intuitive way is a nightmare in your inbox.”
He noted that four years ago, Sitecore started building for a world beyond the website i.e. a world where content and data were currency that firms could spend across a digital ecosystem where AI is trained on a company’s own brands and operational lifecycles. This demands a platform that is fully optimised for shortening the distance between content and commercial outcomes with customers.
“Companies need to ask themselves – what question is your brand the answer to? That’s key,” said Stines. “Now, for the first time, with SitecoreAI, we are offering our entire platform in a single cloud-native composable portfolio that includes all solutions and services. This is our next-generation digital experience platform with AI embedded throughout. We have delivered a studio tool that offers all the flexibility organisations need to drive their marketing activity towards multi-channel experiences through a single interface.”
Content, data & personalisation
“Built on the foundation of Sitecore XM Cloud, SitecoreAI unifies content, data and personalisation in a single, composable SaaS platform designed to optimise as teams work – helping marketers launch faster, spend smarter, and improve performance through AI-enabled workflows. At its core is the Agentic Studio, a workspace where marketers and AI collaborate to plan, create and personalise experiences. The Agentic Studio debuts with 20 AI-powered agents that automate complex workflows from campaign planning to content migration, production and testing – and gives marketers and their agency partners the flexibility to design their own agents and flows using simple visual tools with no coding required,” said the company, in a press statement.
Within the Agentic Studio, Agentic Flows orchestrate multi-step personalised campaigns from briefing and experimentation through publishing and optimisation, keeping teams aligned with full visibility. Spaces enable real-time collaboration between people and AI, turning disconnected tools into a coordinated system that supports continuous improvement through feedback and insights.
Running on Microsoft Azure, SitecoreAI is the evolution of XM Cloud, unifying content management, customer data, personalisation and search in one secure, scalable platform that adapts through configuration and human feedback. For current XM Cloud customers, the upgrade is seamless – no migration required, full continuity of data, and instant access to the Agentic Studio and its pre-built AI agents.
Transparency, security, compliance
Built on Sitecore’s governed AI framework, SitecoreAI ensures transparency, security and compliance with emerging enterprise and regulatory standards. SitecoreAI allows marketers to launch campaigns quickly, personalise content at scale and maximise the value of every asset, so teams can move faster.
For some more formal background on probably (actually, definitely) the biggest announcement of this show, as suggested in the C-suite speaker’s comments, Sitecore introduced Sitecore Studio, billed as “the breakthrough innovation layer” of the SitecoreAI digital marketing platform. Sitecore Studio gives users a chance to build and customise AI-powered agents and workflows that automate marketing tasks within secure, governed environments. It places artificial intelligence at the centre of marketing and, importantly, in the hands of marketers.
Symposium showcased many of the more than 130 use cases developed by 75 different organisations that address real-world marketing challenges and streamline key workflows through intelligent automation. These use cases build AI-powered agents, connectors, and experiences that demonstrate the next generation of digital marketing innovation in SaaS.
What’s inside Sitecore Studio?
Sitecore Studio creates a governed, connected workspace where enterprises can design and deploy their own AI agents, connectors and extensions with the same security, scalability, and control because it is a core component of the platform. Ending the long-standing trade-off between SaaS simplicity and enterprise flexibility, Sitecore Studio enables every organisation to shape the platform around its unique needs.
“Sitecore Studio removes one of the biggest barriers companies have faced in realising the full benefits of cloud-native platforms: benefiting from the simplicity of SaaS combined with the freedom to tailor solutions and processes that make their brand unique,” said CEO Stine. “As SaaS becomes table stakes in the AI era, Sitecore Studio shows how we make it work in the real world. For 25 years, Sitecore has led through innovation that empowers marketers and partners to build what’s next — and with Sitecore Studio, we’re extending that legacy into SaaS, giving enterprises the freedom to customise, connect, and innovate on their own terms.”
Sitecore Studio offers connected environments where marketers, developers, and partners can design, extend, and share AI agents at scale: Agentic Studio, App Studio, Sitecore Connect, and Marketplace. Together, they turn SitecoreAI into a living system of creativity and co-innovation, from AI experts composing complex flows to everyday marketers putting them into action.
As a final comment on Sitecore Symposium, it’s rare to attend an event that extends from the slightly Hollywoodesque level of the opening keynote (CEO Stines used to be a Broadway producer) with the obligatory big picture customers, customers, customers message set… through to a complete platform toolset explanation with product leaders and systems specialists… and then onward to the command line with a hackathon (the Sitecore Marketplace Hackerspace was a hands-on coding zone at Symposium 2025 where developers could rapidly learn how to build extensions using Sitecore SDKs) and find all that in one package.
It’s almost like a digital marketing content user experience company really thought about how to present digital marketing content and user experiences at its annual show, right?
Web crawling is dead
The wider suggestion here – in the world beyond the website – is that the new web doesn’t “crawl” anymore (as in the trawling scraping actions of web crawlers designed to search on our behalf), today it reasons via AI… and that means we need to reengineer marketing technologies for AI. Sitecore pledges to be the company that connects, enables and facilitates creation in this space.
