It seems like a long time ago since we were sitting in the front row of the SUGCON Europe keynote address in Dublin watching Sitecore Chief Product Officer, Roger Connolly, tease us with some of the upcoming AI features that were to be embedded in Sitecore tools like XM Cloud and Content Hub in the near future.
That was in April of this year. It’s taken six months to see these features to roll out but it has certainly been worth the wait. At last week’s Sitecore Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee, Sitecore Stream got an official launch and it was the biggest splash of the week.
There has been a huge amount of noise in the AI space over the last couple of years since ChatGPT started getting serious mainstream adoption, most of which includes a healthy dollop of hyperbole thrown in for good measure.
However, there are some great examples in the tech space of AI features being bolted on to existing tools to supercharge them. There doesn’t have to be an all-singing, all-dancing standalone AI tool that is touted to work wonders, but rather AI-powered features that can compliment existing tools that users are already familiar with and use on a regular basis.
Sitecore Stream is a collection of brand-aware AI capabilities designed for marketers to enable smarter, quicker end-to-end content creation and delivery at scale. The aim of these features is to automate repetitive tasks and boost collaboration in order to make content creation faster, more efficient, and aligned with brand guidelines.
“AI-enhanced workflows” will help with things like creating content, building website pages and components, as well as personalisation and A/B testing to name a few. The platform will let you upload your brand guidelines and values so the system can provide brand-specific content when required.
Practically speaking, there is a portal that sits over the top of the Sitecore solutions you use, including XM Cloud and Content Hub of course, but even XP too.
It can help users at every stage of the content lifecycle:
From a trust point of view, Sitecore will never use your brand data to train the underlying AI model and you will even be able to plug in your own AI, a custom GPT for example, so that the system can run off even more contextual data.
There are still a few questions around licensing and pricing structure to clarify, but some customers are already using these features. Nestlé is using Sitecore Stream to manage 3,000 brand documents and campaign toolkits which it trained with text, images and videos to make sure it stays true to its brand in Sitecore’s Content Hub digital asset management (DAM) platform.
It might have taken six months since we first saw these features before we have witnessed them out in the wild, but it’s heartening to see Sitecore give this platform the time and love it deserves so that customers can feel the benefit for years to come.
At Remarkable, we bring over 30 years of experience in creating experiences that convert. We bring together deep expertise across multiple specialisms to solve complex brand experiences. Working with Sitecore, Optimizely and Salesforce to build beautiful date-driven digital experiences that drive growth. If you’d like to know more about how we use digital transformation solutions to transform your business, contact Remarkable today.
