Day 2 kicked off with more insights from industry leaders and experts. The importance of empowering teams was emphasized, to reinvent how marketing and product teams work cohesively to create and optimise digital experiences. "Content is at the core of every digital experience".

Recapping some key product roadmap insights below.

Orchestrate roadmap

Exciting planned innovations for the CMS and CMP products.

SaaS Core

Introducing composable architecture to the CMS giving total flexibility to build your solution.

Planned for H1 2024.

Visual Builder

Experience builder in the CMS to create, design and reuse brand approved templates without .NET development.

Planned for H1 2024.

Omni channel authoring and delivery

"Create content once and publish anywhere" from the CMP. With GenAI capabilities, marketers can create better content, faster and easily push to downstream channels via integrations.

Planned for Q4 2023.

Web Experimentation self hosting

The standard JavaScript snippet can now be self-hosted in your CDN, eliminating the need to make a connection to the Optimizely Web Experimentation CDN. This will overcome the known latency issues when running experiments.

Whether this will also be possible for websites running on Optimizely DXP will need to be explored with Optimizely support.

Optimizely Graph - the new search engine

Optimizely Graph, the new name for Content Graph, is a multi-tenant SaaS service that allows to search, query and deliver content anywhere.

Optimizely Graph provides similar functionality to Search and Navigation with additional benefits such as search flexibility, performance and AI-enhanced semantic search. Semantic search improves search accuracy by understanding the searchers intent and the contextual meaning of the terms, compared to a standard keyword search which only searches for the keyword terms in the content. As shown in the below example, semantic search produces more relevant results.

However there are some current limitations with Optimizely Graph as per below including no support yet for nested queries (planned).

Search and Navigation is not going away and may continue to be the preferred first option for PaaS solutions but there is an opportunity to gradually start adopting Graph and use both engines side by side until such a time that Optimizely Graph gains parity on the missing features. There is also developer learning overhead to factor in i.e. using GraphQL queries instead of NET client library.

Optimizely Graph is straightforward to get started with by installing NuGet packages. Please refer to developer documentation for more information.

It is available to all CMS customers on Optimizely DXP.

Clean water changes everything

Scott Harrison, CEO of charity: water ended the day by delivering a moving insight into his journey and mission to bring clean water to everyone on earth. It resonated with the room and brought awareness of a problem not familiar in developed countries - access to clean water.

His 100% model is all about bringing confidence to public donors that 100% of their donations is funding clean water. He does this by leveraging private donors i.e corporations and celebrities for all overhead costs.

Technology is a big enabler for charity: water, from experimentation-driven digital experiences to remote monitoring of well sensors to get alerts on malfunctions.

Clean water is a basic resource that makes a huge impact to peoples lives, it allows children, families and communities to thrive. It certainly changes everything!

Wrapping up

Optimizely delivered another world-class event focusing on seizing the moment and making an impact.

It's time to head back armed with learnings and expert insights to help customers navigate through their digital transformation / maturity journeys.

Opticon - wrap up