7 takeaways from Opticon 2025: AI, and going beyond the website

On 29-30 September 2025, I joined around 1,500 customers and partners at Opticon, Optimizely's annual conference in London. It was brilliant to catch up with former colleagues from my time at Optimizely and to discuss their future roadmap and new capabilities.

Key takeaways from Opticon 2025

Here are seven takeaways from what were presented and how we view their recent announcements and strategy:

1. AI is central to Optimizely's strategy. Through Opal, they're focusing specifically on marketing AI, particularly for content. I think this focus is a smart differentiator.
2. Opal could become a standalone marketing AI platform. Until now, it's been unclear whether Opal is just an add-on for Optimizely's tools or something bigger. My view is that it's fully capable of becoming the go-to marketing AI – competing with ChatGPT Enterprise or Copilot, not just extending CMP, Experimentation, or CMS.
3. Integration between Opal and CMS has some conditions. While Opal now works with Optimizely CMS 12, there are a few requirements. It needs Optimizely's new authentication layer, Opti ID, and to use CMS content as context for queries, it requires Optimizely Graph (which most customers don't currently use). Agentic editing – where Opal can actually modify content – is still further down the line. That said, Opal is a strong marketing AI platform even without the CMS connection.
4. Optimizely Analytics is worth watching. This visualisation and analytics product connects directly to your data warehouse and has probably flown under the radar for most customers. It looks particularly interesting for web analysis, as it's much more focused on event data than typical BI solutions like Power BI, Tableau, or Looker. If you're already collecting advertising data, GA4 events, and revenue data in your data warehouse, this could be very relevant. (One drawback: it doesn't natively connect to Microsoft's data warehouses like Synapse.)
5. Experimentation gets a meaningful upgrade. Opal brings tangible improvements here – particularly for creating UI variations, which is exactly the kind of task where AI-generated front-end code makes sense.
6. CMS 13 customers get an asset management boost. For customers considering a move to CMS 13 or the SaaS version, the DAM from Optimizely CMP will be included* – a significant upgrade from the fairly basic asset management in the current CMS. (*The licensing model hasn't been finalised yet, so we're following up with Optimizely on this.)
7. GEO remains a hot topic. While we don't think it meaningfully impacts conversions in the short term, chatbots and AI summaries mean marketing teams need to reconsider both their technical setup and their content and brand marketing. (Keep an eye out for a webinar on this – we have some interesting insights to share from our customers.)

Overall impressions

Optimizely has demonstrated they don't just have a comprehensive digital experience platform – they have a collection of genuinely strong products, with Opal being a timely and rapidly evolving addition.

However, Optimizely's messaging and branding remains tech-focused, which can be a challenge when trying to reach wider marketing teams and marketing leaders. While those of us in the Optimizely sphere see them as a strong brand, I often speak with marketing leaders outside the web domain who haven't heard of Optimizely or don't know what they do.

I think this represents the biggest opportunity – both for Optimizely and all of us using or building on their platform: We need to extend our impact beyond the website, and genuinely move the needle on marketing effectiveness overall.