Take the Wheel as a Strategic Change Agent
Opticon25 promised us a new age of digital orchestration, where the DXP is the central nervous system of a unified customer journey. But the truth is, the most provocative takeaway from this year’s Opticon isn't about AI at all. It's that AI is useless if we treat the CMS as the hero of our digital strategy.
Websites are no longer destinations. They’re just one touchpoint in a sprawling, multi-channel ecosystem.
The traditional website is losing traffic. People are leaving, not because the website is bad, but because their needs are being met on social platforms, in apps, and through conversational AI.
This gives rise to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). It's a wake-up call. The real power move isn't to get more visitors to a static website, but to make the experience so compelling that every visitor who arrives has a higher chance of converting.
This isn't just about A/B testing a button color. It’s about a radical shift from acquiring traffic to optimizing the quality of every single interaction. Let’s dig into examples of how we’re helping business leaders drive efficiency and achieve growth with Optimizely in the age of AI.
Drive Content Efficiency with Opal
Optimizely's AI product—Opal—opens the door to new possibilities for marketers and businesses. Optimizely's AI product—Opal—opens the door to new possibilities for marketers and businesses. The key is shifting from efficiency-focused automation to unlocking new types of work and business outcomes that were previously unattainable.
Let’s examine how Opal 2.0 enables a fundamental shift from traditional product content management approaches.
Opal Instruction Agents in ContextMaintaining consistent, accurate product information across multiple systems and sales channels is a huge challenge for B2B manufactures and distributors. Each product carries dozens of critical attributes including technical specifications, pricing, images, videos descriptions, and compliance data, all of which must remain accurate and synchronized across websites, marketplaces, and distributor portals.
Traditional approaches to product content management are failing. Manual processes, siloed systems, and repetitive workflows create bottlenecks that prevent teams from delivering consistent, accurate, and brand-aligned product content across channels (website, marketplace, distributor portals).
At Icreon, we’re using AI to solve this problem and help businesses update and maintain vital content at scale.
The traditional product content management lifecycle encompasses seven critical stages: authoring, enrichment, review, publishing, maintenance, monitoring, and retirement. At each stage, organizations face significant challenges.
Optimizely's Opal represents a fundamental shift from traditional product content management approaches. Rather than simply digitizing existing processes, Opal leverages AI-powered instruction agents and multi-mode system orchestration to augment every step of the product content management lifecycle.
Opal represents more than just an incremental improvement in product content management—it's a fundamental reimagining of how organizations can leverage AI to transform their operations. Opal represents more than just an incremental improvement in product content management—it's a fundamental reimagining of how organizations can leverage AI to transform their operations. By augmenting human expertise with intelligent automation, companies can finally break free from the manual processes and siloed systems that have constrained their growth.
The platform's multi-mode architecture ensures that it can handle both immediate needs (like responding to urgent content requests) and complex, long-term initiatives (like comprehensive catalog harmonization). This flexibility makes it suitable for organizations at any stage of their digital transformation journey.
Opal addresses the core challenge facing B2B organizations today: the need to scale personalized, high-quality content creation without sacrificing accuracy or brand consistency. As customer expectations continue to rise and competition intensifies, the ability to efficiently manage and optimize product content across multiple channels will increasingly determine market success.
For organizations ready to move beyond treating their e-commerce platforms as "digitized print catalogs," Opal offers a path toward truly modern, AI-powered product content management that can scale with their ambitions while maintaining the precision and consistency their customer's demand.
ABM with Optimizely One
Optimizely enables professional services firms to implement Account Based Marketing (ABM) and integrate with intent data sources like 6th Sense, providing new capabilities for sales and marketing teams.
Optimizely One is made for marketers. Its component-based interface allows non-technical users to personalize content and manage websites more effectively than developer-centric platforms.
We’re developing Opal use cases to help B2B Organizations operationalize Account Based Marketing at scale, harmonize product content data, and generate brand-specific content to optimize for SEO and GEO.
The Rise of Generative Search
Across industries, businesses are witnessing unprecedented declines in website traffic. Many sites are experiencing drops of 10-30% year-over-year, a trend that initially appears alarming but reveals a more nuanced story about user behavior and intent.
Beneath these numbers lies an important insight: while traffic volumes are declining, the quality of that traffic is improving significantly. Users who do click through to websites demonstrate higher intent and convert at better rates than before. This shift from quantity to quality represents both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses willing to adapt their strategies.
Modern websites must simultaneously optimize for human visitors seeking validation, branded experiences, and complex interactions, while also serving as content sources for AI agents that scan, analyze, and synthesize information for users who may never visit the site directly.
Transforming your digital presence for AI-powered discovery requires a structured approach that balances immediate needs with long-term strategic goals. The most successful implementations follow a phased approach that allows for learning and iteration while delivering measurable results.
The path forward requires immediate action across multiple fronts. Begin by conducting a comprehensive content audit to identify high-value digital real estate that can be optimized for AI discovery. Assess current content against the new rules of AI visibility, identifying opportunities to shift from keyword-focused to conversation-oriented approaches.
Develop a cross-platform content strategy that extends beyond your primary website to include emerging channels where AI systems gather information. Consider ungating valuable content strategically to improve AI visibility while maintaining lead generation goals.
Most importantly, implement measurement systems that provide visibility into AI interactions with your content. Understanding this hidden layer of engagement is crucial for optimizing performance in the age of AI-powered discovery.
The organizations that thrive in this new landscape will be those that act decisively while their competitors are still debating whether change is necessary.
It’s Time to Take the Wheel
Icreon’s true value is cultural enablement. We empower business leaders of any stripe—from marketing managers to C-suite executives—to live out the agility and culture of experimentation that makes this platform work. We teach you how to ask the right questions, how to embrace failure as a learning opportunity, and how to use Opal to orchestrate genius.
It’s time to take the wheel as a strategic change agent.