That Martech Girl
Where Martech meets culture- The business podcast with personality
That Martech Girl
Unveiling Opal: AI Revolution at Opticon
The marketing technology landscape is experiencing a seismic shift, and at the epicenter is Optimizely's revolutionary AI platform, Opal. Fresh from Opticon in New York, this episode takes you behind the scenes of what might be the most significant advancement in marketing operations we've seen in years.
Optimizely, recognized as the leading digital experience platform by both Forrester and Gartner, has unveiled an AI system that goes far beyond basic chatbot functionality. Opal represents a fundamental reimagining of how AI can transform marketing workflows from content creation through experimentation and analytics. What makes it truly revolutionary is its contextual understanding of your brand combined with its ability to orchestrate multiple AI agents working in concert across your entire marketing ecosystem.
The practical "Crawl-Walk-Run" framework shared at Opticon provides organizations with a strategic approach to AI adoption. Starting with building a foundational toolbox of AI capabilities, progressing to integration in daily workflows, and ultimately scaling to full automation of complex processes, this measured methodology helps marketing teams overcome adoption challenges while focusing on what matters most: creativity, strategy, and innovation. As one participant noted, the varying approaches to AI within different organizational units often creates friction—HR might be cautious while marketing pushes forward—highlighting the need for unified strategies when implementing agentic AI tools throughout an organization.
Looking beyond the horizon, Opal's roadmap reveals exciting developments in three core areas: becoming smarter through enhanced memory capabilities, more connected through integrations with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and increasingly productive with features like workflow agents that analyze websites overnight and provide optimization suggestions the moment you start your workday. These autonomous capabilities fundamentally shift what's possible in marketing operations, allowing teams to accomplish in seconds what previously took days. Want to see how AI is transforming marketing from the inside out? This episode provides your front-row seat to the revolution. Share your thoughts on how you're approaching AI adoption in your organization!
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Hello and welcome back to Episode 7 of that Martech Girl, the podcast where Martech meets culture, the business podcast with personality. I'm your host, rachel Gray, and today is a very special episode because last week, the that Martech Girl team was on site in New York at Opticon. This is the event I've been inviting you guys to. It's the premier event for Optimizely. That is where I work. We are the number one digital experience platform for marketers, and it's not just me saying this.
Speaker 1:This is noted by Forrester and Gartner, and there was so much that happened at this event. There was so much goodness there, but what we want to focus on today are the newest and the greatest in AI. There were some really new innovations and revelations, really, that were rolled out at the event, so we want to talk a little bit about that. We also got some practical advice on how organizations can best adopt AI during this AI revolution that was focused for marketers. So I think really sharing that information with you guys would be the most helpful in today's episode. So today, my digital products manager and I, we are going to sit down and give you a recap on everything you missed and also everything we learned that we feel is really essential for you to know. Now let's get into it. Hi Sabrina, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing so great. How are you, Rachel?
Speaker 1:I'm good, it's morning here, right after Opticon and I am coming down from the high of what yesterday was.
Speaker 2:I know me too what a whirlwind of it feels like a week, but it was really one day.
Speaker 1:I know so much happened in one day. Before we get started, though, I do want you to introduce yourself to everybody our MarTech, that MarTech Girl audience. If you could just let us know who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm Sabrina. I'm a product designer. Yes, so I'm Sabrina, I'm a product designer. I have experience across agency, startup, nonprofit and corporate environments. I love being the extra mile to make sure that my designs resonate with diverse audiences. I love collaborating with stakeholders and users and making sure that we have like a harmonious kind of relationship with the product and the people it serves. I'm super passionate about projects that are meaningful and purpose-driven and I love contributing into the greater good of the impact on individuals and communities to make positive, lasting change.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Sabrina is working as my digital products manager here at that MarTech Girl and she has been really the wheels and the brains behind everything going on, if you see those beautiful designs on LinkedIn or Instagram. That's all, sabrina, because, as you guys know, I am so busy. I'm doing Optimizely, I'm doing that Martech Girl, I'm also doing the Vandy Emba program. So, yes, you wear a lot of hats right now. So you know she's like my body double and she was at the event and you know she's new to the opti-mizely understanding of this amazing company. So she's coming in and kind of seeing things for the first time. So, like, what were your overall impressions of things? Like, what did you think? What was your takeaways?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I feel like my eyes weren't big enough for the event. There were so many things like that it was. I really felt like I just jumped into a whole new world, a whole new universe. The production was insane. I felt like I was at a concert. It was really well put together. There was so much excitement around all of the new products and the AI tools and stuff, so I was really happy to be there and meet the people that were behind this huge production.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really thought so too. I thought it was my first Opticon as well, so seeing it being produced in person was something that I was just very impressed by. And another thing that was like really a big standout was Alex and his keynote. Because I know that I am I call myself dramatic, but then I heard somebody say charismatic. I was like that's a better word charismatic. And he's very charismatic and just like the way that he explained his inception coming to New York, um, and just the passion around Optimizely and Opticon and Opal it breeds excitement, so I loved it. What was your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:No, absolutely. Just to piggyback off of what you were saying, it was just so inspiring his story of going to New York and having a big dream and just daring to dream, especially just coming to the United States. I totally resonate with that and just enlarge it in life and after you achieve your dream, there's more dreams to conquer. It's a never ending journey and endeavor. So it was so refreshing to see someone kind of express that in an open way and I just feel so super charged by it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. No, I also resonate with, like the coming to America, where I think we're both, you know, women of color and both have immigrant backgrounds. So just hearing that and hearing that story, it like resonates with you, like, oh, you're able to do what I can too, right, yeah, so so inspiring. So our approach to the event was, you know, I was meeting with my clients, I was doing optimizely business during the event and Sabrina was going into different sessions and kind of just having a listening ear. She's being a journalist.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:As to what was going on. So I mean you talked about one that really resonated with you. There was really some key ideas in that session within each of those categories that you explained to me. So if you could go into that just to share with the audience of like, how can we approach AI and the tools at Optimizely in this approach?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So. The key theme was that you know, and they really break down this really simple framework that teams could use, and the objectives really focus on helping teams identify and achieve their use cases, overcome adoption hurdles by building AI trust and then overall growing and maturity in AI. So ultimately, the goal is to focus on creativity, strategy and innovation while AI handles those repetitive, mundane tasks.
Speaker 2:So, moving into Crawl, it's all about building the foundation within AI. So you really want to build your toolbox and have that inventory of AI tools to use for simple tasks. Then, after you get that foundation, you want to move on to walk, which is all about integrating AI into your everyday work. And then, after you build that foundation, you move beyond those simple tasks and try to offload those tasks into automation or at least partially automating those kinds of things. Then finally run, and this is when you're scaling.
Speaker 2:So this is when it gets really interesting when you move beyond those simple tasks and then you're driving that automation, linking those agents to systems to handle those complex processes and do like, for example, real-time brand compliance checks or doing the full life cycle of content management. So that's when it gets really interesting. So the biggest takeaway from the Crawl Walk Run is that AI adoption ultimately is a journey. You don't want to jump into the deep end. You kind of want to get your feet wet, get acclimatized to it. You don't want to rush into this automation. It's all about strategy, patience and focus on people always.
Speaker 1:I really love that I was talking with a customer like how we were dividing and conquering yesterday.
Speaker 1:And the customer was saying you know, there is this varying approach within the organization, within different organizational units, and that's creating inertia because it's like, yes, hr wants to kind of hold the line while marketing is pushing forward, so it's like kind of a fight going on where it's, hey, all right, I guess we're gonna just do our own thing with AI. But, as we're seeing here, it kind of needs to be eventually a unified approach if we're talking about an agentic you know approach to AI and actually using these agentic tools as workflows throughout the entirety of the organization. So I really like this strategic approach with first starting with crawl and then actually having practicality within the crawl, walk, run approach, where it's like we start with the toolbox, we move into, finally, automation, as like the big picture, ending like the final idea of where we're going. So just being able to have practicality within each of those steps is so great. So I love that.
Speaker 1:Another thing we're going. So just being able to have practicality within each of those steps is so great. So I love that. Another thing we're talking about, because Sabrina is new and she is seeing Optimizely and Opal for the first time. She's like, well, you know we talked about Opal, but what exactly is Opal?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is Opal? All this talk about Opal, so I would love for you to break it down, not only for me, but for the audience.
Speaker 1:I really like that question because it was, like you know, nobody really knows, so I'll break it down for you. First, I think we need to start with Optimize Leave right. So we are a marketing operating system. With Optimize Leave right. So we are a marketing operating system.
Speaker 1:So, at all of the processes and work that gets done within a marketing organization, we have tools to support that, from the inception of content right. So the planning, the creating of content that's in our CMP. Then we actually have a CMS for the production of content. We have actually a place to store all of that content and build it on the website. And then we have a commerce tool and, in addition to that, once it's built on the website, then we have the ability to experiment. We have experimentation tools to be able to say, hey, is this resonating with our audience? Right. And then finally being able to analytically see, okay, what are our results. And, instead of throwing things against the wall, let's be strategic as we actually plan, create and produce content right. So it's the entirety of the marketing workflow that Optimizely as a whole has been supporting for years Now. Imagine AI built and integrated within each of these tools, connecting all of these tools right that sounds insane to me.
Speaker 2:tools right, that sounds insane to me.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, so you know each of these tools. They're composable meaning, and what that means is like you don't have to be on optimizely for each of these tools. But, in a perfect world, if you were and you had Opal embedded throughout this entire workflow, how insane would that be in terms of productivity and just learning who you are as a brand, to have a ai tool at the inception of content all the way through to analysis of content, right?
Speaker 1:so having just that tool to be there each step of the way, as not only just like a chatbot embedded in your workflow, but also this new agent orchestration platform that was unveiled during the event, where we're actually building out agents that can connect throughout the entirety of the workflow and, like they visually showed it at Opticon and it looks kind of like connectors throughout the workflow literally linking tasks to each other. Yeah, it's, it's insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so, so impressive. I cannot wait to see, like, what comes from from all of this. Just just, it's just really amazing.
Speaker 1:Honestly, being new to Optimizely, I'm also impressed. I've never seen an organization kind of work this fast and hard and just go at it like this fast and hard and just go at it like literally is talking to um, the head of the sa team and he was like, in order to prepare for opticon, he had to kind of be on all weekend because opal was different on friday than it was on mond Monday. He had to be able to like be on because they were moving so quickly. He's like no, I have to understand what's going on on Friday, saturday, sunday, because Monday is going to be completely different oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:I feel like we're in the revolution period now, right, so things are changing. Things are rapidly moving and this is just the pace. This is how things are going. But let's talk a little bit about the roadmap, because you were able to kind of pop in on that session for Opal and understand what we have right now and where things are going. If you could share a little bit about that, we'd love to hear what we have right now and where things are going.
Speaker 2:If you could share a little bit about that, we'd love to hear. Yeah, absolutely so. I did attend the Opal roadmap talk with Lauren Hammersted the VP of product at Optimizely.
Speaker 3:My name is Lauren Hammersted.
Speaker 3:I'm the VP of product of Opal at Optimizely.
Speaker 3:Opal is the agent orchestration platform, so we've had a significant launch on May 7th and then we just launched agentic capabilities yesterday, and so Opal allows our customers to build their own agents, leverage tools, leverage RAG and really autonomously run their marketing or their digital MarTech stack through a team of agents.
Speaker 3:I think there's so much that's exciting about Opal and about agentic creations. I would say the one that I'm the most excited about is workflow agents that we launched, because it allows you to have a team of agents work behind the scenes and then give you the information the second you wake up. So if you think about having all of this work that you know you need to do or you try to get done but humans only have so much bandwidth in a day, right? So the one I'm the most excited about is agents looking at your website, analyzing pages for outdated links, for GEO, for SEO, for compliance, for targeted personas, and then giving you suggestions the second you wake up on how to optimize that website and then giving you different variations to test and to personalize, and you can bring that to your team within seconds and say, hey, this is how I'm going to optimize the website today, and then tomorrow it might be a completely new set of feedback from the agents.
Speaker 2:And she kind of went over like a like a high level overview of where Optimizely is and where it's going.
Speaker 2:So the three core themes that Opal was kind of built around was being smarter, being connective and being productive. For smarter, they were really working on Opal's memory and enhancing the memory, so Opal can remember the past interactions that you have with it and it will remember your preferences and it will have built-in quality checks for those outputs. When it comes to connectivity, it's all about bringing Opal to you and your existing tech stack, like Slack, and then a co-pilot in Microsoft Teams coming soon. Then, moving on to productive, boosting your team's efficiency is all about driving those tools and features that save time and streamline your work tools and features that save time and streamline your work, so that looks like a library of ready to use agents, which sounds super, super exciting and interesting to me. This concept called Canvas, which is a collaborative workspace within Opal in development, and then there's in-app guidance with real-time AI assistance embedded into Optimizely, products like CMP, cms and experimentation coming very soon. So there's a lot of really cool, exciting things that are coming to Opal AI soon.
Speaker 1:I love how you broke that down, because it relates to a question that we get often, which is how is Oval different from ChatGPT? We talked about this a little bit, but I think that roadmap kind of answers those questions, which is, while ChatGPT is a chatbot I think there is some agentic capabilities there but it's certainly not a agent orchestration platform. It also doesn't know your brand from the inside out, and that is why I kind of talked about those tools earlier, because if you have an AI tool that knows your content from the inception of it, so it knows your brand guidelines, it knows your unique voice, it knows, like, who you are as a organization, it understands your ethos right, it will be able to spit out more like ideal ideas and be able to do work for you better than just generic work. And also another thing like it's contextual to your organization, but it's also contextual to the knowledge of Optimizely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we invented experimentation. So just that alone, and having that knowledge that we've been able to train it on, is essential in it being able to advise you within, like the experimentation process. But then think of that multiplied throughout each of the tools, so CMP, cms, commerce and then analytics right, so that's powerful. So I mean I think now you need to go first on your overall experience and thoughts on just optimizing in general the wonderverse Uh-huh, and then I'll go with, like my final thoughts on the whole event.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just touching about on, like what I said before, it was a whole new world for me. I found it extremely inspiring with the different talks and it really puts your kind of ideas in perspective, encouraged, and you're freely to speak your mind and say your ideas, because there's no crazy ideas here With this whole Opal conversation. It's larger than life. So it's completely inspiring for someone like me to jump into this world because I feel like the sky is not even the limit you can go beyond and just keep going. So I feel completely inspired, uh, to see what's coming next and, yeah, that's, that's just how I feel about it.
Speaker 1:that's a really great perspective. I never thought about it like that and I think it's because we have our different roles and perspectives. Right now I'm within Optimizely and you're kind of like new eyes looking in, but I never thought about it like you know, the sky's the limit, because Opal is like bigger than life right now it's and it's it's getting more smarter, it's getting faster right, and adoption is just insane.
Speaker 1:I, I love that from my, my end. It was just really good to connect with clients. So, you guys know I'm I'm new to Optimizely, but being able to have some face-to-face time with them, um, and just conversations, I, I love it. I think that teams can only go so far, right, even our conversation, like just to get to know you better. So we met on tiktok, guys. Yes, that's how, that's how we started our journey, very millennial, you know. Then I convinced Sabrina to come on to the that Martech Girl team and she's been here, but we actually, haven't, like, seen each other in person, so it was our first time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we met in person at the event, which was so cool to me.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. So the same thing with just being able to have some one-on-one time with them and understand their needs, their wants, how they see not only Opal but their relationship with Optimizely and just being inspired by that their conversation. So that was my takeaway I just feel really empowered to go back and have more conversations. Thank you so much, Sabrina, and thank you so much for your support at that Martech Girl. You guys, if you see it looking professional and amazing, it's all thanks to Sabrina. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of that martech girl. Please don't forget to follow us on whatever streaming platform that you are listening to this episode on, and follow us on instagram and linkedin at that martech girl. Your support is greatly appreciated. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye.