• Optimizely’s AI assistant Opal has evolved into a full-scale agent orchestration platform, bringing automation, specialised agents and insights to the Optimizely One suite to give enterprise marketers more time to focus on business growth.

• At Opticon London 2025 we heard how embedding AI with humans at the core, automating repetitive tasks and smashing barriers to marketers' executing their campaigns will see early adopters come out on top.

• UNRVLD’s Optimizely MVPs and Strategy team are building Opal proof of concepts for our enterprise clients to determine how to derive maximum value from AI agents across their digital experience and marketing operations.  

Opticon London 2025 once again reminded us why it’s the flagship event for enterprise marketing, digital product and technology leaders to explore the future of digital experiences. As Diamond Sponsor of the event, and a Platinum Optimizely Partner for more than six years, we were delighted to see 1,300 attendees turn out to be inspired and educated on a day jam-packed with valuable content.  

16 of the UNRVLD team – including 3 OMVPs and our Strategy heads - were present to hear product updates and use cases, understand real-world results and see live demos. The content was heavily skewed to AI, both how marketers can harness it and the impact it will have on how they reach audiences in the future, plus the latest iteration of Optimizely’s AI product Opal.

We’ve gathered the event’s key takeaways from UNRVLD’s Optimizely MVPs on what the future of using Optimizely looks like, and how enterprise marketers can start preparing today.

The evolution of Opal  

There’s no doubt that Opal was the main topic of conversation that got our Optimizely MVPs excited. Opal has emerged from its announcement as a new AI assistant two years ago into an AI agent orchestration platform with revolutionary potential to drive forwards Optimizely’s entire ecosystem.  

Opticon saw a host of new Opal capabilities unveiled or demonstrated:

• Opal Canvas (beta) - An interactive workspace for creating business assets such as charts and presentations, designed to help teams collaborate and experiment faster.

• Opal Workflows (beta) - A drag-and-drop AI automation tool that connects multiple agents with triggers like chat, email, webhooks and scheduling.

• Opal orchestration – A library of specialised AI agents and tools in workflows that let tasks be automated in sequence, conditionally, and using triggers.

• Opal Agents – Specialised agents that help you piece together workflows to enable your marketing to scale smarter, faster and easier. The scale at which you can make agents will change how marketers use Optimizely moving forward.

Optimizely is moving towards a future where AI is embedded at the core, across the full digital operation including data sources and third-party tools. This will support everything from web development, through to optimisation and experimentation, personalisation, marketing operations and content and campaign creation.

While previous demonstrations have focused on campaign creation, Opticon London 2025 was a chance for Optimizely to really demonstrate the opportunity to build AI-accelerated workflows to automate repetitive, complex and data-intensive tasks. These tasks are often the barriers to marketers and other digital professionals from being able to focus on the parts of their roles where they can add the most value.  

For example:

Marketers can use Opal to ensure all digital content produced meets brand guidelines, a huge time-consuming challenge when done manually in large, distributed organisations. Digital assets can also be tagged by AI to automate their organisation and make it easier to reuse them across channels, campaigns or geographies.  

Product managers can use Opal to better understand customer needs to inform product roadmaps: or accelerate aspects of web experimentation programmes such as planning and variation development. Non-technical team members should also be able to create experiments themselves more easily.

Ecommerce managers can automate the optimisation of product descriptions, personalise product recommendations and improve conversion funnels.

For now, Optimizely users are being given credits to encourage them to experiment with what’s already possible. This is a great opportunity to explore where Opal can be deployed to deliver AI-accelerated workflows, enhancing existing processes and ways of working. The UNRVLD team is already working with a selection of our clients to determine and build proof of concepts for AI agents to test how value can be derived.

AI principles for digital experience optimisation

The demonstration of new AI capability was complemented by deeper conversations focused on the use principles that will shape future success for enterprise marketers as they get to grips with adopting AI.  

• Start with the customer, not AI – AI should accelerate your vision, not replace it. It’s more valuable to begin with customer needs and layer AI on top.

• Keep the human touch – AI is powerful but unpredictable and should be used to empower teams and remove doubt in decision-making. Human oversight ensures creativity, empathy and brand consistency remain intact  

• Make AI everything, everywhere all at once – AI is most effective when woven across systems and integrated deeply within your marketing platform – working with CMS, experimentation, analytics and data – giving it the context of your brand guidelines, customer data and business objectives.

These steps emphasise that it should be approached as a journey, rather than an overnight replacement. For example, experimentation to provide real customer value should continue with humans and AI working together to maximise creativity and deliver optimal results.  

One session at Opticon also noted that displaying humour, empathy, shared experiences and authenticity in a world of accelerating automation is crucial as individuals are asked to embrace fundamental change on the inevitably bumpy adoption path for AI.

This approach supports the discipline we have here at UNRVLD to maintain ‘Human at the Core’ as we use AI, where AI is used to support and not replace human creativity, judgment and accountability. We see Opal and its functionalities as an extension of this vision, using AI to empower people and free up time to focus on creativity and strategy.  

The next chapter for Optimizely CMS

Alongside the evolution of Opal, Optimizely has introduced significant advancements to its CMS suite. The SaaS CMS has an all-new visual editor, and Optimizely CMS 13 (coming soon) will support visual low/no code builders, an optimised graph, semantic search and modern APIs.

This is building on Optimizely’s latest CMS features which were unveiled earlier this year - a suite of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) features designed to ensure website content is visible to LLMs. They address shifts in traffic from traditional search results to AI tools across three core areas:

• Page Optimisation – Pages now need to be structured so data can be surfaced, summarised and selected by AI agents. To help make pages GEO-ready, Optimizely supports better page optimisation with Q&A field generation, GEO-specific metadata (including Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EEAT)) elements for generative engines and markdown summary generations.

• Site Optimisation – Optimizely simplifies site-wide optimisation by enabling top-down signals for AI discovery, generating topic-specific pages designed to rank in AI-generated summaries, automatically signalling which pages should be indexed by LLMs and applying GEO metadata in bulk to new and existing content.

• GEO Analytics – Metrics now reveal AI’s invisible interactions with your content by scoring pages against AEO and GEO best practices as part of a GEO health index, the crawl-to-refer ratio on your website and show which LLMs are hitting a brand’s site most frequently.

These advancements empower enterprises to optimise their discovery by the most popular AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini at a time when many are already experiencing declines in traffic to their website.  

AI-driven marketing transformation is just beginning

If there’s one clear takeaway from Opticon London 2025, it’s that AI is no longer an optional layer or a discrete tool that sits separately from your core digital tech stack. It will quickly become at the core of digital experience creation and optimisation: and is already fundamental to maximising the potential of the Optimizely One SaaS suite.  

For marketing and digital teams working with Optimizely on a daily basis, utilising Opal to provide valuable insights, fast-track workflows, boost creativity and improve digital performance could quickly change what it is possible to achieve.  

Opal transforms how work is done, removing barriers to insight and freeing up time spent on manual work. Enterprise marketing teams will be able to move from idea to impact more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

As an Optimizely Platinum Partner we are happy to advise on how to get started with utilising Opal across your Optimizely tech stack and build out a plan to maximise the value you can create from the automation opportunities it enables. Get in touch if you would like to learn more about our AI and Data capability and outcomes.

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