Sitecore Symposium

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The Agentic Leap: Sitecore Symposium 2025 AI Deep Dive into Strategy, Use Cases, and Client Success

The content below was generated with help of AI. I prompted AI to help create an executive summary and curated list that covers everything AI in upcoming Sitecore Symposium 2025, scheduled for November 3-5 in Orlando.

Executive Summary: The AI Mandate at Sitecore Symposium 2025

Sitecore Symposium 2025, will center on the fundamental redefinition of digital experience driven by Artificial Intelligence. The overarching theme, “Next is Now,” acknowledges that AI has profoundly altered consumer behavior, replacing traditional search with summarization and converting clicks into definitive conclusions. This shift mandates that brands meet customers across novel channels and touchpoints that did not exist recently.

  • The New Paradigm: Augmentation vs. Automation – A key strategic indicator of Sitecore’s direction is articulated by CEO Eric Stine, who will emphasize the limitations of existing, disconnected marketing solutions and the fragmented experiences they create. The strategic focus of Sitecore’s platform evolution is clear: prioritizing augmentation over automation and relevance over reach. This positioning redefines Sitecore’s AI not merely as a tool for reducing labor costs, but as a critical growth engine designed to scale human creativity and accelerate the marketer’s capacity to connect, create, and compete.
  • Industry Context and Strategic Sponsorship: Accenture’s Agentic Shift – The focus on agentic frameworks at Sitecore mirrors a broader industry trend among global professional services firms. Accenture, for example, is leveraging similar principles, having recently launched its “Physical AI Orchestrator” solution. This cloud-based offering integrates AI agents from Accenture’s AI Refinery™ platform to help manufacturers create software-defined facilities and live digital twins, highlighting the enterprise reliance on autonomous, goal-oriented AI systems. Accenture is participating as a Strategic Sponsor at Sitecore Symposium 2025. Furthermore, they are the exclusive partner for the highly anticipated #ExecutiveExchange, a premier program designed for senior industry leaders to explore the possibilities of content, data, and AI, and gain valuable actionable insights. Joined by Sitecore’s leadership and a select group of global thought leaders, this Exchange is designed to spark ideas and foster meaningful connections for C-suite attendees.
  • The Three Pillars of Sitecore’s AI Strategy – The Symposium agenda is structured to address the complete lifecycle of enterprise AI adoption, from strategic planning to implementation and governance. The sessions reveal a focus on three core pillars essential for achieving the AI advantage:
    • Strategic Vision: Establishing the architectural foundation, the product roadmap, and the necessary governance frameworks for the future “Agentic Web.”
    • Tactical Execution: Showcasing specific, measurable use cases in both content orchestration (velocity and compliance) and developer acceleration (code generation and platform governance).
    • Real-World Validation: Presenting client stories that validate how global brands build trust, achieve scalable personalization, and modernize their architecture to be truly “AI-ready.”

Strategic Vision: Sitecore’s AI Roadmap and Agentic Future

The strategic sessions at Symposium will focus on establishing the architectural and corporate intent behind Sitecore’s AI investments, demonstrating a shift beyond rudimentary generative capabilities toward advanced, integrated intelligence.

  • Defining the Advantage: Speed, Scale, and Trust – The General Session, “Speed, scale, and trust: The AI advantage for marketers,” sets the executive tone for the event. Sitecore Chief Product Officer Roger Connolly, joined by leaders from major global enterprises including Infor, Regal Rexnord, AFL Global, and Berkeley Homes, will discuss how intelligence and imagination must work together to unlock entirely new ways to compete in the digital space. The discussion centers on utilizing AI to accelerate content delivery, amplify creative output, and, most critically, build lasting trust at scale.  The repeated emphasis on “trust” is highly significant in the enterprise context. It signals that Sitecore recognizes the profound corporate liability associated with AI outputs, such as hallucinations or compliance breaches. Therefore, the core strategy involves developing AI solutions with inherent guardrails for brand safety, data integrity, and regulatory adherence, positioning AI not just as an efficiency tool, but as a critical competitive advantage built on verifiable governance.
  • The Agentic Framework: The Technical Roadmap – A key session provides an exclusive look into Sitecore’s product roadmap, focusing on how its platform is being reimagined with intelligence. This session details how advanced agentic frameworks will power intelligent and seamless workflows across the entire product suite. This move toward agentic frameworks signifies a major architectural transition. Rather than relying on rigid, sequential DXP workflows, Sitecore is building decentralized, goal-oriented AI entities—or “agents”—that possess the autonomy and context needed to execute complex, cross-product tasks. These AI agents will be empowered to “plan, synthesize, and act” wherever assistance is needed. The necessary precursor for this capability is a fully composable, API-first backbone, such as XM Cloud, which provides agents with the required data context and execution permissions to operate effectively and autonomously across the DXP ecosystem.
  • The Foundational Imperative: The Experience OS – For AI acceleration to be effective, a unified and governed digital ecosystem must be in place. The session “The Experience OS: Preparing Digital Foundations for AI Acceleration” addresses this foundational requirement. The analysis indicates that fragmented, ungoverned legacy systems (characterized by low content and data maturity) inevitably lead to inconsistent AI outputs and dramatically increase the human resources required for correction and oversight. Leaders from Horizontal Digital and Gradial will share how AI can accelerate site operations only after a foundation is built that successfully unifies teams, standardizes components, and establishes scalable governance. Establishing this “Experience OS” is therefore the fundamental structural step that enables the desired strategic outcome: efficiency, consistency, and accelerated delivery across all digital properties.

Strategic Partner Spotlight: Accenture’s AI and Innovation Sessions

Accenture’s presence at Sitecore Symposium 2025 extends far beyond the Executive Exchange, featuring a strong lineup of engaging sessions that showcase innovation and customer impact, particularly around AI-driven strategies. Attendees are encouraged to visit Accenture at booth 229 to connect with their Sitecore experts and explore how AI-driven content strategies are shaping the future of digital experience.

Key sessions featuring Accenture include:

The Curated AI Session Guide

The following table provides a curated list of key Sitecore Symposium 2025 agenda items, summarizing their strategic importance, technical focus, and client application.

Session TitleCore Theme/FocusSpeakers/Client Case StudySummary and Key TakeawaysRegistration Link
Speed, scale, and trust: The AI advantage for marketers (General Session)Executive Strategy & TrustRoger Connolly (Sitecore CPO), Infor, Regal Rexnord, AFL Global, Berkeley HomesExecutive insights on positioning AI as an advantage, leveraging intelligence and imagination to accelerate delivery and build lasting trust at scale, moving beyond mere automation.Link
Sitecore’s AI roadmap: How agentic frameworks will transform digital experienceAI Roadmap & Agentic ArchitectureSitecore Product TeamExclusive look at the AI roadmap, demonstrating how future AI agents will be empowered to “plan, synthesize, and act” across the DXP for seamless, intelligent workflows.Link
Harnessing AI for content creation: Introducing AI Experience Generation for Sitecore XM CloudContent Use Case & Product DemoRichard Seal (Principal Engineer, Sitecore), Mo CherifPractical demonstration of the new AI Experience Generation app in the XM Cloud Marketplace, detailing AI-driven page creation and the technical architecture for building Marketplace extensions.Link
Orchestrating the Future: AI-Powered Content Operations with Sitecore, Gradial, and EPAMContent Supply Chain & Operational EfficiencyTimothy Marsh, Amanda Follit (EPAM)Strategic methods to overcome content fragmentation and slow cycles by implementing intelligent, orchestrated AI content supply chains that enhance audience resonance.Link
Navigating AI readiness – it’s not what you thinkOrganizational Strategy & AdoptionVickie Bertini (EPAM)Addresses the non-technical hurdles of AI implementation, focusing on organizational resistance, strategic roadblocks, and how to effectively manage change in the enterprise.Link
Creating an AI-powered content supply chain for regulatory markets using SitecoreIndustry Use Case & ComplianceMike Shaw (CI Digital)Essential session for high-compliance sectors (H&LS, FS) detailing how AI-driven automation ensures governance, streamlines approvals, and transforms regulatory data into compliant narratives.Link
Cutting Sitecore development time by up to 80% with AIDeveloper Tooling & Code GenerationRajitha Khandavalli (Meritage Homes)Deep dive into leveraging context augmentation with MCP Servers and integrating external data (Jira, Figma) to enable accurate, high-speed, AI-generated code generation, drastically reducing development cycles.Link
Deliver Measurable Operation Efficiency with Agentic AIPlatform Governance & DevOpsN/A (HelixGuard Focus)Introduction to the HelixGuard “AI co-pilot,” blending MCP intelligence, analytics, and automation to proactively elevate platform performance, governance, and experience delivery in an agentic framework.Link
Scaling smarter: How Vizient uses Sitecore to personalize, integrate, and innovate in a complex B2B healthcare landscapeClient Story & AI FoundationJonathan Price (Americaneagle.com)Case study detailing how a complex B2B healthcare organization established “AI-ready infrastructure” and achieved smart personalization and faster time to market following a digital transformation.Link
The Experience OS: Preparing Digital Foundations for AI AccelerationInfrastructure Strategy & GovernancePam Butkowski (Horizontal Digital)Strategic session outlining the necessary pre-conditions for AI success: unifying teams, standardizing components, and establishing scalable governance models for faster delivery and consistency.Link

Conclusion: Leading the Future of DX with Sitecore AI

The Sitecore Symposium 2025 agenda confirms a decisive strategic pivot: Sitecore is transitioning from providing a traditional Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to offering an Intelligent Experience OS built on the principles of augmentation and agency. The analysis of the session topics suggests that the focus is on three intertwined strategic vectors: the deployment of agentic frameworks to automate complex, cross-platform workflows; the delivery of measurable efficiency via AI-driven content orchestration and developer acceleration; and the commitment to enterprise governance to ensure trust and compliance in high-stakes environments.

For digital leaders and technologists, the Symposium presents a compelling narrative that moves beyond simple generative AI experimentation. It outlines a comprehensive, strategic path forward where AI serves as the catalyst for continuous innovation, provided that organizations first establish the required foundational agility, standardization, and change management principles necessary to support a truly intelligent and composable digital future.

Next steps

In this blog post, we looked at the upcoming Sitecore Symposium 2025, where we looked at everything AI related. With help of AI, I have managed to review the agenda items and come up with this curated list. Stay tuned for future posts, feel free to leave us comments and feedback as well.

360Agileweb

Sitecore AKS blue-green Search indexes deployments

This is a follow up to my Sitecore Zero Down time deployments series of blogs. I have also previously presented on this top during the Sitecore Symposium 2021.

If you haven’t read my previous blogs or watched my Sitecore Symposium 2021 session, I suggest you please pause now and go have a read or watch before proceeding with this blog post.

In this blog post, I will deep dive into the approach for Zero down-time deployments for Sitecore Indexes. I am going to use the Sitecore AKS workload for my scenario, although the same concepts can be applied for your Sitecore PaaS workloads too.

Blue-Green Web Index deployment strategy

To ensure complete isolation of your Sitecore Web Index during the Zero down-time deployments, you need to create two sets of the Web indexes:

  • Web Green Index to correspond to your CD green instance
  • And Web Blue Index to correspond to your Blue CD instance

This means during a deployment; you can do a full re-indexing of your staging CD without risk of breaking your LIVE CD

Blue Green Sitecore Web Index deployment strategy

This infographic captures the initial state when CD GREEN is LIVE and shows the transition when we do a new deployment.

You will notice that in the final state we have swapped CD BLUE to serve the live traffic, achieving Zero down-time deployments.

CI/CD Pipelines

How do you implement this?

Below, I am sharing a high-level CI/CD pipeline that I have used in my scenario for reference.

Sample CI/CD pipelines

In Blue-Green deployment strategy, you typically deploy to Blue CD instance, when Green CD is currently in production and serving LIVE traffic OR vice-versa. This is how we achieve zero downtime deployments. 

You can now extend your CI/CD pipelines to be aware of Web Blue Index and Web Green Index. You do this by ensuring that you update you Content Management (CM) instance configuration to point to the correct Web Blue or Web Green Index. This is achieved by parameterizing the Sitecore Index configuration patch files.

Your CI/CD process will then update your CM and CD images with correct Web Blue or Web Green index, before building them accordingly as show above. And that is it.

Prefer to watch the video instead?

If you prefer to watch my video instead, I have included the link below.

Video to walk you through the Sitecore AKS Blue-Green Search Index strategy

Next steps

If you have any feedback or questions, please leave me a comment, and I am happy to get back to you.

Also, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you don’t miss out on latest updates.

360Agileweb

Sitecore Symposium 2020 highlights part one

In this series of blog posts, we will revisit the recently concluded Sitecore Symposium 2020 where I will examine my key takeaways from the event.

This year saw the biggest Symposium ever with more than 5,500 people registering across more than 70 countries. I somehow managed to get myself an All-Access ticket, which I got as reward for being a speaker during the event.

Having an All-Access ticket meant you had access to all Live, Featured and On-Demand sessions. As of the time of going to press, you can still access the Video On-demand which is very cool in case you need to re-play any of the sessions you might have missed.

In this blog, I will start with revisiting the sessions presented by the Avanade teams.

Highlights from Sessions by Avanade

At Avanade, we are a Sitecore Platinum partner and this year we proudly sponsored the Symposium 2020 event as Connector Sponsors.

Our teams were available round the clock in the Partner Pavilion where we engaged attendees in the Virtual Chats covering the following areas:

  • Avanade Industry Sales Accelerators
  • Headless Digital Experience Accelerator
  • Accelerate Business with Avanade – Here’s How

Attendees had a chance to also watch our webinars below:

On the other hand, we had our speakers running the following sessions during the Symposium:

Bringing life-changing hearing health to a global audience with Demant

This Digital & Business Transformation session saw Christian Bennich our Digital Marketing Lead in Avanade Nordic interviewing Troels Kjær Rasmussen the Head of Customer Facing Applications, Demant Group.

I really enjoyed this session as it captures what we do best at Avanade, your digital transformation partner. In the session, Troels describes how 5 years ago, Dermant Group had a challenging Business landscape with aggressive acquisitions, branding equity and other technology challenges. This impacted their Total Cost of Ownership too. Fast forward to today, the Avanade partnership has helped “Establish one strategic platform that could cater for the combined needs of the entire group”. Worth mentioning that at the core of this transformation journey is the Microsoft Azure cloud and Sitecore Experience platform.

The key takeaways from Troels includes to always aim for long term success through a repetitive model of: Realize, Learn, Scale.

I would highly recommend watching this session on-demand for the full interview.

Defining new ways to transact with Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 and Azure IoT

This Experience-focused Commerce on-demand session was presented by Benjamin Adamski, Solution Architect, Avanade and Boris Brodsky, Director of Architecture, Avanade.

During the session, Boris and Benjamin outlined the case for IoT as there is marketplace expectations for seamless and automated commerce to extend into the physical world.

Armed with staggering statistics, the Avanade duo put forward a compelling case for taking IoT seriously:

  • it is estimated that there will be 1.9 Billion 5G Cellular subscription by 2024
  • it is estimated that more than 75 Billion IoT devices will be connected to the web by 2025

Some of the key takeaways include driving the business outcomes with IoT and Connected Commerce leveraging:

  • Automated checkouts
  • Personalised discounts
  • Smart Shelves/Inventory Management
  • Automatic Supply Chain Management

This is one of those session you will want to replay and replay again, as Boris and Benjamin go on and on How to implement IoT with Sitecore leveraging Headless Sitecore Experience Commerce.

Even the losing experience is a win!

This Featured Sitecore Fundamentals session was presented by Andy Leonetti, Digital Strategist, Avanade and Leah Feldman, MarTech Strategist, Avanade.

Tapping into Andy’s 10+ years with Customer Engagement and plenty of Digital Marketing experience from Leah, the Avanade duo put together “Your guide to experimentation” with Sitecore experiences.

This session tells the story behind the framework for testing and optimising the Microsoft Partner Network that will inspire you to get testing if you are not already!

Key takeaway for me is how easy it is to leverage out-of-the-box Sitecore Experience Optimization capabilities to test and learn.

Andy and Leah summarised their session with the pointers below:

  • Make it valuable – align experiments to organisational business outcomes
  • Define & measure – define your experimentation inputs
  • Set up & run – set up your test using your measurement inputs
  • Share results – determine the experiment winner and communicate results
  • Take it to next level – Utilize Engagement value scale and generate impactful experiment ideas
  • Make it repeatable – Create a process for your team to follow and optimise

Use Sitecore Host plugin architecture to transition on-prem Active Directory workloads onto Azure

I have previously blogged about my session and how I prepared for it. You can revisit the post here.

My session was themed Problem Solving Through Technology, and I discussed how you can leverage the Sitecore Host architecture to resolve the issue of deprecated Sitecore AD module as you transition into the cloud.

Key takeaways from my session is how easy and quick to leverage Sitecore Host architecture to create custom Sitecore Identity host plugins, including free sample code samples

Conclusion and Next Steps

This concludes part one of this series of blog posts revisiting the recently concluded Sitecore Symposium 2020. Until next time, keep watching!

360Agileweb

Sitecore Symposium 2020 (Oct. 26-28, 2020) is here, jump in with me

Yes, I will be presenting for the first time!

The wait is over. Sitecore Symposium 2020 is here. This year we will have the first all-digital Sitecore Symposium. Are you excited?

Well, I am very excited indeed for two main reasons. Firstly, I am lucky that I will be presenting for the first time in a Sitecore Symposium. More about my session in a second. Secondly, I am very excited at the content and sessions that the Symposium team have put together this year.

Join me for my on-demand session on Transitioning on-prem Active Directory workloads onto Azure

You will need to Register to watch my session

How I prepared for my session

As I promised earlier, I will walk you through how I prepared for my session.

I had two review sessions with Sitecore technical teams to help review my session content and tailor it for my audience. I found these sessions useful and it helped me reduce the number of my slides in my presentation as well as amplify the right message.

All on-demand sessions should be 20 minutes long. To this end, I had to practise and rehearse my presentation using the Presenter Coach tool from Microsoft. This is a great tool to hone your presentation pace and provides great feedback such as shown in the screenshot below. I will highly encourage you give this ago

Rehearse your slide show with Presenter Coach

The actual session recording was done using the Microsoft PowerPoint recording tool. I found this tool very versatile as I could record each slide at time, watch it back and re-do it without having to start the entire recording all-over again. Below is the screenshot on how to access this tool:

Microsoft PowerPoint Record Presentation

My session also include a demo, which I recorded using an open-source the Screen Recording tool OBS Studio. I have used various screen recording tools before, but I prefer OBS due to versatility it has in terms of actual recording experience and editing afterwards.

Viewing on-demand sessions

Update: My session recording available here

Please remember to register so you have un-limited access to all on-demand sessions. Follow this session link to access my presentation titled “Use Sitecore Host plugin architecture to transition on-prem Active Directory workloads onto Azure”

The screenshot below shows the agenda at glance Please remember to select your region so that you get the localised time so you don’t miss your favourite sessions

Agenda at a glance

I am looking forward to seeing you all at the Symposium!