← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#641: Creating brand-savvy AI and a marketer-first DXP with Dave O'Flanagan, CEO of Sitecore
00:40:53
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
Domo Representative
Wouldn't it be great if you could ask your data anything at any time? Like how are sales this quarter? How's the new marketing campaign performing? What does the overall health of the company look like? And actually get answers right away. With charts and graphics and actionable information, you can with Domo's AI and Data products platform. Domo lets you channel AI and data quickly, securely and innovatively to deliver measurable insights wherever and whenever you need them. Anyone on your team can use Domo to easily prepare, analyze, visualize, automate and distribute data, all amplified by AI. Domo goes beyond productivity. It's designed to transform your processes, helping you make smarter and faster decisions and drive real growth. All powered by Domo's trust, flexibility and years of expertise in data and AI innovation. The world's best companies rely on Domo to make smarter decisions. See how Domo can help transform yours. Learn more@AI.domo.com that's AI.domo.com the Agile Brand.
- [01:15]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
- [02:12]
Co-Host
As AI is reshaping how marketers create and deliver digital experiences. How do brands ensure that automation doesn't strip away authenticity and the nuances of.
- [02:21]
Greg Kilstrom
A company's voice and identity?
- [02:23]
Co-Host
Also, it's always exciting when a platform we rely on unveils even a few new and helpful features. Well, on Wednesday, Sitecore announced over 250 new innovations for its platform, including AI driven tools that help brands create, manage and optimize their digital experiences. Joining us today is Davo Flanagan, CEO.
- [02:43]
Greg Kilstrom
Of sitecore, a global leader in digital experience software that powers the websites and digital experiences of some of the world's biggest brands. Today we're going to explore how AI.
- [02:52]
Co-Host
Is changing the game for marketers, content creators and digital teams.
- [02:56]
Dave Olthaga
Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Greg. Really great to be here.
- [03:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Before we dive in, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your journey to.
- [03:06]
Co-Host
Becoming CEO of sitecore.
- [03:08]
Dave Olthaga
Yeah, great. Well, so my name is Dave Olthaga. I'm the CEO of sitecore. Coming up on my one year anniversary in in a few weeks time. I'm a math stats guy. That's where, that's where I came from. I spent the early part of my career career coding. I was part of a startup in the telco space that exited in 2007. I started building my own company again another startup in 2011, company called Boxhour. We provided enterprise CDP and personalization capabilities to large organizations globally and Sitecore acquired my business in in 2021 where we became well, I joined as Chief Product officer for three years before taking this role as CEO and during that period was working on the integration of a couple of key acquisitions to accelerate sitecore's path to the cloud and creating what we now know as our intelligent dxp which is our composable cloud native solution anchored on our next gen CMS but with world class capabilities like personalization, cdp, search and digital asset management all fully in a fully integrated suite that allows customers to really deliver a world class digital experience to their end consumers.
- [04:21]
Greg Kilstrom
Great, great.
- [04:21]
Co-Host
Love it. Well, yeah, let's, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things here. I wanted to start with this idea of the brand savvy AI and so you know, AI becoming more and more embedded in marketing workflows. But there's always some concerns about how closely is it going to adhere to brand guidelines and just voice and tone and all that stuff. How do you define brand savvy AI and why is it such a critical evolution for marketers?
- [04:53]
Dave Olthaga
I think marketers and enterprises more generally are looking to vendors like sitecore to be able to safely use AI. By safely use AI, there's a number of things that come into play. One, is the AI going to have the guardrails so that it doesn't hallucinate the content or outputs or results that it generates are of sufficient quality for the organization so that they can trust them and put them into production, so into a marketing context, onto a website or into an email and be confident doing that. And that's one part of it. The second part of it is trust in terms of is my data safe? As I as an Enterprise start to leverage this capability. Can I use my data safely and pass it to whatever system is using the AI so that I'll know that my data isn't being used to train the AI, my data isn't being shared in some other pool of data for other purposes. And I think for Sitecore, we've spent the last 18 months thinking deeply about how do we rethink marketer workflows from an AI first perspective. Obviously, with the advent of ChatGPT and all of this, it came, came pretty quickly. But when, when we really sat down to think about it, we engaged a couple of key customers to help us understand how, how do they use technology like this, what do they need from technology like this, how do we go about building it? So when we talk about brand aware AI or brand savvy AI, it's about, it's about an AI capability. Think of it as your brain at the center of your marketing stack that really understands your brand deeply. Your tone of voice, your content, your copy, your imagery, how you want to present your, your brand to the world. But in addition, it has all of the enterprise guardrails that a CIO needs in terms of security, data safety, integrity around the data and how it's being processed so that an enterprise can safely use our technology in a way that they feel comfortable doing so. So we think about brand aware AI. It's the safe and secure brain at the heart of the Martech stack that we've spent a number of years building that now powers all of these other new AI innovations that we're bringing to market.
- [07:09]
Co-Host
And to that point, I feel like we've been talking about personalization for decades now and lots of focus on that. But to what you're saying, the advent of generative AI and generative AI at scale with things like ChatGPT, I think really open people up to that possibility of personalization at scale. Right. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how does sitecore approach that? And you know, you talked about the on brand component of it, but the other part is, you know, we've got omnichannel, we've got multiple audience segments, all that stuff. So, you know, how, how do you, how does sitecore help those marketers reach their audiences at scale using AI?
- [07:52]
Dave Olthaga
Yeah, I think, yeah, we have been talking about personalization at scale for decades and I've been doing it for decades, I'm ashamed to admit. But I do think that here's the thing, there's always been AI in personalization, right? So the AI we talk about today is all LLM based and generative AI. But box ever my company that's now sitecore Personalized, we had multi arm bandit and a whole range of different AI capabilities that allowed you to auto optimize your personalization strategy many, many years ago. These are established techniques and algorithms that can be embedded in the organization in a safe and predictable way and they're just part of the feature set that we've had in our technology stack for many years. The thing that has changed and the thing that I saw firsthand working with large organizations like Emirates Airlines or Qatar Airways or big, big organizations globally is one of the limiting factors in terms of being able to deliver personalization at scale is being able to create the sheer number of variants and quantity of personalized experiences. It requires content, it requires a whole bunch of analytics, it requires people to be able to manage all of that. And that was always a fundamental limiting factor. And the expense of creating more content when you needed to work with an agency to create the content or manage many, many parallel personalizations or AB tests together in one go required sophisticated analytics and insights. All of these things required a lot more people and a lot more investment to be able to do it at scale. I would argue that the technology has been in place to do, you know, one to one personalization or hyper personalization at scale for quite a while. But the limiting factors have been organizational limiting factors have been cost limited factors have been operationalizing that in a way that makes sense for an organization. I think with the what we're seeing now with the advent of generative AI, I can create infinite variants of my personalized experience. I can create different copy, I can create different localized copy, I can create specific copy for specific market segments and not just broad segments like you know, silver haired surfers, people over 50 or 60, but actually very targeted micro segments. Because with generative AI I can start to generate content that will resonate and connect with them. So it is, I feel we're now entering the golden age of personalization where the promise of being truly able to deliver a personalized experience is no longer limited by the organizational's ability to deliver. Generative AI can absolutely cover the gaps and fill in the gaps so that we can deliver on that promise. And so that's been something I've been very passionate about here in sitecore as we start to embed this new generative AI capabilities deeply within our organization.
- [10:48]
Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought that. That's what I've been most excited about too, with with generative AI just because again, to your point, we've, we have had most of, we've had the technology to do it. But yeah, what I, what I run into, I work a lot on the operations side of, in large organizations and yeah, they hit a wall, they hit a wall when you know, their team just can't turn out enough content. So yeah, generative AI really, really helps that. The other, the other part of this is we want brand consistency and we want it at scale, but we also want to learn from what works and what doesn't. And so you know, it's not, it's not necessarily contrary to, to consistency. But you know, how do you balance that and you know, how should marketers think about AI that learns over time and yet remains brand consistent and all that stuff? You know, how, how does sitecore approach that?
- [11:45]
Dave Olthaga
There was an interesting thing with an aha moment I had early on in kind of I was thinking GPT2 and I was starting to see some of these new, these new innovations emerge and we were getting really excited about it. In sitecore it was clear to me that search or personalization was going to become far more compelling because historically the way I would do a personalized recommendation would be I would gather first party data on the website. I would gain some intent or trying to mine some intent about what a consumer or user was there to, to, to, to find or what they were looking for. And then I would leverage that data to be able to, you know, recommend products or services or content depending on the purpose of, of the site. Sometimes, you know, I would be able to pull in some third party data from a dmp. But that, that world, we kind of move past that pretty quickly. But now it's, it's really interesting because as I come to the website, I'm, I don't know, I'm going to a, a site that sells, that sells sneakers. You know, I can say I'm a, I'm, I'm a dad of a certain, of a certain vintage that has certain interests and because the LLM has so much intrinsic knowledge about the Internet, it can start to make really, really precise recommendations about what I'm interested in and then match that to the intent and then match that to the product catalog. So it really enriches the ability for a brand to offer far more contextualized, personalized recommendations. If you think about, you know, I'm interested in, in I want to, you know, I run 5K3 four times a week. I need a new pair of runners. I might go talk to ChatGPT or Claude about that and get some recommendations about it. It doesn't need to know much more about me than what I've shared explicitly. So it's, I've given, I've actively given the data in a value exchange with the LLM. But if you take that information and then apply that to what I've been browsing on an E commerce site and align that or filter that based on what's available on the E commerce site, then you get to this really, really powerful recommendation that's aware of the inventory, that's aware of my behavior, but it's also aware of people like me that exist on the broader Internet that is encoded deeply in the LLM. And so when I think about the opportunities to do personalization, I think having this distillation of the Internet available as the first step to work out what I might want is a really, really compelling new innovation in this space.
- [14:10]
Domo Representative
Wouldn't it be great if you could ask your data anything at any time, like how are sales this quarter? How's the new marketing campaign performing? What does the overall health of the company look like? And actually get answers right away with charts and graphics and actionable information, you can with Domo's AI and data products platform. Domo lets you channel AI and data quickly, securely and innovatively to deliver measurable insights wherever and whenever you need them. Anyone on your team can use Domo to easily prepare, analyze, visualize, automate and distribute data, all amplified by AI. Domo goes beyond productivity. It's designed to transform your processes, helping you make smarter and faster decisions and drive real growth. All powered by Domo's trust, flexibility and years of expertise in data and AI innovation. The world's best companies rely on Domo to make smarter decisions. See how Domo can help transform yours. Learn more@AI.domo.com that's AI.domo.com.
- [15:20]
Co-Host
And speaking of some, you know, some of the newer things, you know, certainly AI has been.
- [15:24]
Greg Kilstrom
Been talked about quite a bit over.
- [15:26]
Co-Host
The last couple of years, but agentic AI is, you know, being talked about quite a bit, you know, as over the last few months. Can you talk a little bit about some of the agentic workflows in sitecore's AI enhancements and maybe for those a little less familiar, break down a little bit what it means and how it's going to help marketers?
- [15:47]
Dave Olthaga
Yeah, it's a good question. Here's the thing, right? I believe that work is going to be radically different, is going to look radically different in in two years, three years, five years time. I think that the work we do today, some of the busy work, much of the busy work we do today will be, will be easily automated and taken off our hands and we will be doing different work in the future. I can't say for certain what we're going to do, but I can say that our work, our day to day work is going to look different. Whether that's how we write code, whether that's how we do marketing, whether it's how we do sales, whether it's how we do finance and legal, everything is going to be dramatically impacted and enhanced by the introduction of these, of these, of these new capabilities. And so we think about agentic workflows in sitecore. I talked at the start about, we spent a lot of time a couple of years ago really rethinking marketing workflows from an AI first perspective. So what is the work that marketers need to do? How do they need to do it? It's not that a marketer needs to go into the CMS and edit a page and save a page. That's not really what happens in the real world. A marketer works with a team. They need to find content for that page. They might have a brief that they want to do around launching a new page. They might have some copy and creative that would be briefed to the agency. All of that goes through an approval process and that approval process then ultimately results in it getting published on the website and potentially in other channels. So there's a, firstly, marketing is a team sport and secondly, there's a whole bunch of things that need to happen in advance of what seems like quite a simple task, which is I need to update my webpage or launch a new, I need to launch a new web page. And so when we think about the workflow that sits on top of that, that coordination layer is typically manual today. So as I've outlined, the marketer is being tasked with launching. We got a new campaign we need to launch urgently tomorrow. So the marketer is being tasked with going to brief the agency quickly to get content and copy and put it through the approval chains and ultimately get that through. But there's many, many people involved in that. It could be the agency, it could be some internal development, it could be some localization resources because we need to publish it for different, different GEOs or countries. They could, we need to push it through some accessibility validation. There's a whole bunch of things that need to happen before an enterprise can confidently publish a web page. Today that's largely we're coordinating things between people and stakeholders to make that happen. So we introduced this workflow layer to allow us to coordinate that work. And we want marketers to start their day in sitecore like a salesperson would start their day in Salesforce or a developer in, in Jira. And I think that going there with their list of tasks and things that other people are waiting for and things they have to do immediately to kind of move things forward so that we as a team can achieve the goal we want to achieve, I think is an important new innovation. We've introduced the sitecore dxp. But to kind of answer your question about what does that mean in an AI world, some of those tasks today could already be automated. So for example, if I talk, if I think about localization, I want to launch a landing page. I've got my creative, I've got my copy, I needed to localize it, I need to localize it for French and German before I launch. In addition to my, my English speaking countries in that workflow, as things move through, there's a point in that workflow where historically I might have sent that to a, I might have emailed that to a localization agency, they'd come back with my localized content and I, I'd add that to the system and it would continue. With sitecore, we can introduce agents in the workflow that allow us to do that localization automatically so that it just passes through the workflow, the agent picks it up, it localizes it and passes it on. I think it's a really important step towards the future in that I believe we need humans in the loop at the moment to make sure that the outputs of the agents in the agentic workflow are of sufficient quality, that a brand feels comfortable that they can use them and leverage them and deliver them to their end consumers. And so we think about the workflow that we created. We can coordinate and orchestrate work for across marketing teams and people. Today we have introduced the ability to orchestrate work between people and agents. I would call that hybrid agentic workflows. But it's very important to have humans in the loop, given we know that AI still has propensity to hallucinate. Some of the outputs aren't quite at the quality they need to be, albeit they're very, very good today, but very, very soon. I think as we become more confident and the tools become more capable, we're going to see more and more of those tasks in that workflow become automated. And ultimately I think that many of these workflows can become fully agentic and fully automated over time. And so sitecore's view kind of coming back to right to the start that I shared with you, is that we want enterprises to be able to safely access this technology and introduce it into their organization in a staged and safe way. And so we think about our agentic workflow capability. This is key to that promise, which is you'll be able to introduce steps in your process that can be fulfilled and automated. And over time as you become more comfortable with the quality of those outputs, you can start to dial up or dial down how much of a human in the loop you need so that you can get more efficient with those processes.
- [21:15]
Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, well and to your, to your first point, those role of the marketer, to me that, that type of workflow and that type of automation still lets marketers be marketers. It's just some of the details of what they do are going to evolve over time. I mean I, I use my own personal example of, you know, when I graduate to date myself a little bit I guess. But like when I graduated college I got a job as a webmaster which was a job that didn't exist when I started college and now I don't think it exists anymore. So you know, it's there, there will be new and, and hopefully more valuable work for marketers to be focused on and stuff like that over time. But yeah, I see a lot of potential there and I think that kind of is to the point of this other concept from sitecore which is the marketer first cms. Right. So it's whatever, I'm defining it myself I guess but I'd love your thoughts on, on whether this is true. Is it, you know, the marketer is kind of at the center of this and know their day to day tasks may evolve over time but it's less about maybe relying on, on other teams as much or like what is that? What does that mean to you?
- [22:26]
Dave Olthaga
I think yes, we talk about marketer first cms. I think it's really, I've shared with you that we've rethought the marketing workflows from an AI first perspective, but we've really rethought how marketers work with our technology from a marketer first perspective and that means that they've got the tools and capabilities that they need to be fully autonomous. Typically in a large complex CMS or DXP deployment, there are points in the process that require intervention or assistance with IT resources or some technical resources. In order to kind of launch the campaign or get the page live. And this is typical in all of Martech. We certainly see now that with the advent of these new AI capabilities, many of those technical tasks can be given over to the marketer to do themselves. And I'll give you the most obvious example is being able to manipulate creative in the process so that they can launch a new web page. And so if you think about, say, 10 years ago, if you wanted to resize an image, you'd have to download the image onto your local desktop. I've been there, you know, I need to find some, you find some desktop software to manipulate the image and then you take it and you push it back up. Like, think about how much we can do with our thumb on the phone today, right? I can, I can erase backgrounds, I can take people out, I can resize, I can do, I can do so much with these new really, really powerful video editing capabilities that exist in my phone, right? And so when you think about a world where a marketer is trying to do more with the platform that they're working in day to day, why do they have to, if they need to do the significant image manipulation, for example, why should they have to go to a designer who needs Adobe Photoshop to do some work and then bring it all the way back in to do that? That world is going away. I think designers are going to deliver different value. They're not going to be doing this rudimentary, busy work. I and that's just one example. Or if a marketer needs to launch a new web page with a fundamentally different structure and some complex animations and dynamics, why can't the marketer today will be able to just prompt for that? I this is the type of page I need. Using our brand aware AI, we'll make sure that the page adheres to all of the brand guidelines and copy guidelines and everything else. And they'll be able to create this new complex page without any IT or development assistance. That wasn't possible, you know, two, three, four years ago. It is possible now.
- [25:02]
Domo Representative
With sitecore intel, the reality is striking. While we can stream movies on demand and order anything to our doorstep within a click, healthcare interactions often feel needlessly complex. Healthcare marketers, this one's for you. In Shop Stream Heal author Adeline Ashley shares actionable insights from industry leaders like Netflix, Amazon and Delta, showing how healthcare can thoughtfully adapt their winning strategies. This isn't about technology for technology's sake. It's about making healthcare more accessible, intuitive and human. Drawing from Real World successes and lessons learned. The book shows you how to create healthcare experiences that truly meet patient needs while preserving clinical excellence. Shop Stream Heal by Adeline Ashley features a forward from Deva Flanagan, CEO of sitecore. It's published by the Agile brand and now available in print and digital formats on Amazon. Go to shopstreamheal.com for more information.
- [26:02]
Co-Host
And so, you know, we've, we've talked about personalization at scale. I also, I also want to talk about testing at scale. I mean, sometimes that goes part and parcel with, with personalization. But can you talk a little bit about the ABN testing capabilities and how this helps marketers experiment faster and improve things more easily?
- [26:25]
Dave Olthaga
I see testing and personalization as two sides of the same coin, right? All of us would have great ideas about what personalized experience might resonate or might convert better. But in reality, until you put that test into production on live traffic with real people, you can't say for certain that anything will work. And so how we think about personalized about testing is that they're like your initial this conversion rate optimization. So I'm trying to improve the conversion on your website, or I'm trying to validate that a personalized experience is actually resonating or converting with the customer. And so we think about doing that experimentation. It's about being able to create variants in a for a marketer to be able to create variants in a very easy to use tool, drag drop point, click launch the variant and for the system to do the work, to analyze the data so that they can confidently believe that the output is one statistical significant and two meaningful for the business so that as they put more tests into production, they can feel confident that the system is working on their behalf. Traditionally, A B testing required, despite what many A B testing vendors would say required a significant amount of technical resources and quite a lot of organizational maturity to do it. So if you wanted to launch, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of concurrent A B tests on a website, you've got to know that you have the traffic on the website. You got to know that you can run these tests concurrently, side by side on different pages. And all of the more tests you run concurrently, the more complex and sophisticated the analytics required to be able to do that. And so all of these things, it was probably the unsaid thing about testing and that there's lots of freemium tools out there where I can run maybe tests on my website. But in reality, you know, as you move from a simple test to something more multivariate Test or something more complex. You know, you actually need quite a lot of technical capabilities in the organization to do it. And I've seen this time and time and time again where customers procure a B test tools thinking they can just add a marketer and allow them to set up tons and tons of a B tests. That's not the way the world works. But however, with generative AI, I think you can solve this problem because it allows the marketer to lean on an LLM that is grounded and customized specifically be able to identify tests that need to be able to run, identify segments of customers that you should target, identify business problems that you can optimize and deliver variance to you in a way that takes a lot of the load off the marketer. I think now, again, similar to what I was saying about personalization, there are now opportunities to be able to, for organizations to be able to safely launch a B test that they can, they can believe in. It is interesting because I think when I talk about personalization and AB testing, they both suffer from, have historically suffered from the same challenge, which is it's kind of hard to do beyond the very basics, a B test, the very basic AB test, or personalized to a GEO or a very broad market segment. It kind of gets hard pretty quickly. And I think for us, the focus of sitecore's generative AI investments in that area is really how do we take the load off the marketer and start proactively suggesting, you know what, we've seen a decline in conversion for this segment from these campaigns for this product. We think you should run an a B test and see if you can validate and optimize the funnel. Here are your variants. Click go and we'll start working on that together. And that's, that comes back to my, my, my human in the loop example, Greg. I think in, in the current scenario, we can introduce generative AI to, to really take the load off the marketer, but the marketer is still in the loop. I think as we become more confident and the technology becomes more credible, many of these things become much more automated. Yeah.
- [30:36]
Co-Host
Yeah. So last topic I want to talk about is digital asset management. You know, another, another key component. You touched a little bit on it with the, the image resizing example, but wanted to look at, you know, how is AI transforming digital asset management and you know, what are some of the challenges that AI can, can help them solve?
- [30:58]
Dave Olthaga
I think there's, there's two parts to digital asset management. You know, one, one negative thing or concern I have about The Internet more broadly is, is now with the ability to generate images of all sizes and all types with all people. You know, your ability to trust imagery and content is becoming increasingly challenged. And so for a brand that wants to maintain a certain brand equity in the market and make sure their brand is represented effectively specifically around assets and imagery, I think a digital asset management solution is becoming absolutely critical in an AI first world. The way I see the DAM in this world, you think about a CDP or a customer database as being your single truth for the customer, single source of truth for the customer. I think the DAM is the single source of truth for your assets and your imagery. And as you think about how are you going to leverage that capability to create derivatives of those assets or create new assets, you got to keep going back to your brand signed off assets that can be used then to as seeds for creation of new digital asset capabilities. So as we think about the DAM in the future, I think it's absolutely critical that brands maintain all of their assets in a unified place so that it can feed AI capabilities in a structured and safe way. And in general know as I think about features that we've been adding to our DAM over the last while like visual search is a big one. Just search based on the, the, the, the contents of the video find similar images is a big one. We have grounded image tagging which means that I want AI to tag all of my images based on what it understands the image is. But I also have a very complex and sophisticated taxonomy that I've implemented enterprise wide in terms of how I manage my images. So I want the AI to be aware of that taxonomy so that it can tag them effectively. It's not just sticking a couple of tags on it, it's actually working through a hierarchy of data and updating those tags and attributes so that all of the information is stored and cataloged correctly. And that's going to be important as you think about accelerating AI capabilities using generative AI to, to kind of use that information that's stored in the DAM to be able to do more with it over, over time. So we're hugely bullish on our DAM capabilities. Our DAM is Unilever P and G Chanel Richmond. Some of the largest global CPGs in the world are powered by Sitecore. And you may have seen Greg, that we co innovated to build sitecore stream our AI capabilities with Nestle. Actually it was Nestle that came to us and said we need to rethink how we do marketing operations in our organization. We believe There's a huge opportunity with generative AI. We don't quite know what it is and so we spent a year and a half co innovating with Nestle building the first iteration of sitecore Stream with them and it was hugely beneficial to us. And obviously Nestle got a huge amount of value out of it as well. But they were great partners in that process and that was mainly focused on the dam where I guess the initial use cases for generative AI, given it's so content and image heavy, are immediately obvious.
- [34:23]
Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I've done the taxonomy thing alone. I wish I had that a few years ago myself on some of these, these, these very large projects. Right. But no, that's, that's great. Well, I know we didn't have a chance to talk about everything, you know, all the, all the things unveiled, but you know, if, if there's one thing that we missed that you'd like to highlight here, we'd love to, would love to hear. You know what didn't we touch on that listeners should check out?
- [34:51]
Dave Olthaga
I think just in General, we've introduced 250 new innovations across our intelligent DXP. We talked a little bit about Sitecore Stream, which we released a number of months ago, but we've continued to enhance and we're releasing a whole bunch of new improvements on the 19th. But I think you should take away from this discussion that sitecore is innovating at pace. We are committed to delivering the best products in market and our vision is pretty simple. We want to be recognized as the number one DXP in the market. We're building some of the most innovative software in the market and we're leading the pack with applying AI in this specific space. So we're certainly excited about the future. We're excited to see what our customers do with this new release and we're busy planning for the next one.
- [35:40]
Co-Host
Love it. Love it. Well, Dave, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. I like to ask everybody, what do.
- [35:47]
Greg Kilstrom
You do to stay agile in your.
- [35:49]
Co-Host
Role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [35:52]
Dave Olthaga
So I'm a techie and so one of the things I'm really passionate about is staying up to speed with current trends. We've talked a lot about AI, but I've got way too many subscriptions to all of the AI tools and I spent my Christmas getting up to speed with Cursor, Windsurf and Replit and some of the other tools. And so I think I drive some of my team crazy, my cto, my CPO crazy. But I know that I'm really, really passionate about staying current in this new world where things are moving so quickly and so I see enormous opportunity. I love talking to CMOs and CDOs that they're looking to us to see what we can do. And by staying a little bit closer to the technology, sometimes hands on keyboards and developing applications, I feel that I can be more credible in those conversations as I as I understand the technology at a much more fundamental level. My wife doesn't appreciate the fact that I'm I like it, I see it as fun, my wife sees it as work. So I'm all trying to balance my home life with that. But you know, I'm really, really passionate about technology. I'm really passionate about the impact technology could have on our customers and their customers lives. And it's a real privilege to be here in sitecore making that happen at the scale, at the global scale that we have.
- [37:17]
Co-Host
Yeah, love it. Well again I'd like to thank David Flanagan, CEO at sitecore for joining the show. You can learn more about Dave and.
- [37:23]
Greg Kilstrom
Sitecore by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled program production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [38:22]
Dave Olthaga
The Agile Ground.