Tech with Jagmeet

Attending Opticon, Optimizely’s flagship event, is always a great opportunity to get a glimpse of what’s next in the world of digital experience. For anyone who lives and breathes content management, the CMS roadmap reveal was particularly exciting. It’s clear that Optimizely is not just evolving its product; it’s building a new foundation where AI isn’t a bolt-on feature, but an integrated, powerful co-pilot for your entire digital team.

The central theme of the new roadmap is simple but profound: less grunt work, more innovation. Optimizely is leveraging AI and strategic platform enhancements to free up marketers and developers from tedious tasks, allowing them to focus on creating and optimizing truly exceptional digital experiences.

A CMS Built for the AI Era

The biggest news from the roadmap is how Optimizely is embracing artificial intelligence. We saw a vision for a CMS that manages itself, starting with the content library. Imagine an “AI Library Agent” that automatically organizes, tags, and even writes descriptive alt text for your digital assets. This isn’t just about saving time; it’s about making your content more discoverable and accessible by default.

This intelligence extends beyond the asset library. Optimizely is introducing “Opal Tools,” a new layer that connects the CMS to external data and third-party AI agents. This means your AI can do more than just generate text—it can pull in data from your CRM, analyze customer behavior, and even enforce brand voice across your content. It’s about building a seamless, intelligent workflow where your content and data are no longer separate.

Optimizing for the New Search Reality

The way people discover content is changing. We’re moving beyond traditional search engines, with a growing number of users relying on generative AI to find information. Optimizely is one of the first to acknowledge and build for this new reality with its focus on “GEO/AEO” (Generative Engine Optimization/AI Engine Optimization).

The new platform will give you unprecedented visibility into how AI bots—like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT—are interacting with your site. It will provide the insights you need to ensure your content is structured and formatted correctly, so that it can be easily read, understood, and surfaced by these new AI-powered systems. In a world where visibility is key, Optimizely is giving marketers the tools to make sure their content is seen by both humans and bots alike.

The Next Generation of CMS

Beyond the AI integrations, the roadmap outlined significant platform upgrades that signal a major leap forward. The announcement of CMS 13 promises a new, future-proof foundation built for speed and resilience. This isn’t a small patch; it’s a re-imagination of the platform with an optimized graph and modern APIs. This is about giving developers a powerful and flexible platform to build upon, ensuring the CMS can scale to meet the demands of tomorrow’s digital landscape.

For marketers, the platform is becoming a true experimentation hub. New features will allow you to run content variations and A/B tests directly within the CMS, making it easy to test hypotheses and optimize your content for maximum impact. This moves experimentation from a separate, often complex, process into a natural part of your content creation workflow.

Finally, the roadmap highlighted a commitment to an open and extensible ecosystem. With features like new webhooks and a more extensible user interface, Optimizely is empowering developers to connect the CMS to any part of their tech stack. This means your CMS will no longer be an isolated system; it will be a connected hub that syncs with your entire digital ecosystem in real-time.

Looking Ahead

The Optimizely CMS roadmap is a bold statement about the future of content management. It’s a clear move away from the CMS as just a publishing tool and toward a platform that is intelligent, autonomous, and deeply integrated into the modern digital ecosystem. Optimizely is building a solution that serves marketers, developers, and AI alike, and it’s a future that’s already within reach.