Unlocking the future: a look at Optimizely’s 2024 roadmap

As summer is upon us, we must admit that we are already halfway through 2024! As such, many of the great announcements made by Optimizely at the Opticon 2023 flagship event have already started rolling out, bringing more value to all customers of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Here’s a recap of the most recent features, as well as a sneak peek to what’s to be expected in the upcoming months … while waiting for exciting new announcements at Opticon 2024 in November! 

Artificial Intelligence built in 

There’s no coming back: AI is already transforming the way we work. There are tremendous opportunities to use AI when creating, running, and optimizing digital experiences. Optimizely presented their own AI model – named OPAL – last year at Opticon. The result, half a year later, is impressive and well-integrated throughout the whole digital content lifecycle. Here’s some of the new AI capabilities that have been rolling out in the platform recently. 

• BYOAI: Bring you own AI. WRITER is now fully integrated in the Optimizely One platform to allow enterprises to use industry-specific language learning models (LLMs) to generate content using the Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) that is tailored to their business, branding, and tone. Talking about CMP, marketing can leverage AI to accomplish a variety of tasks, such as ideating (using OPAL), generate content and images, translate content into other languages, automatically suggest tags for images and generate cropped variations (DAM).

• AI is well-leveraged in Optimizely Experimentation as well, helping marketing being more efficient by generating copy suggestions, getting faster experiment results, manipulate traffic distribution to minimize time to statistical significance and create a predicted intent audience condition using adaptive audiences. 

• The Optimizely Data Platform (ODP). One of the best customer data platforms on the market – is also levering OPAL to generate a summary of a customer’s event history on the customer profile. When using content recommendations, it can also populate the customer profile with the top 3 topic interests generated by Optimizely Content Intelligence.

If you want more details, you can review the full list of built-in AI capabilities on the Optimizely website. 

Optimizely Content Management System 

Optimizely Content Management System (CMS), a robust, scalable, and enterprise-ready CMS that enables digital team to manage content for multiple digital properties in a single and simple environment, has evolved quite a lot in 2024. Not only has the UI been refreshed, – making the content authoring experience easier than ever, but the CMS is also being offered in a new SaaS / headless flavor, and a whole new set of search capabilities are being introduced, allowing to develop great and efficient search experiences. 

SaaS Core CMS 

From an architectural perspective, Optimizely CMS was only offered as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product in the past, but not anymore! As of a few Q1 2024, a beta SaaS version is being rolled out and will be soon available to all Optimizely customers. This fully managed flavor of the CMS offers unbounded digital creativity for customers looking at a modern, flexible, headless solution, outside of the traditional ASP.NET MVC framework.  Using APIs (a way for software components to communicate), content can be delivered to any digital experience, and content authors won’t have to bother about the rendering side of their content.  This also means that every new update of Optimizely CMS will be available right away to the end users, as they won’t have to wait for a development team to upgrade and deploy the latest fixes and features. 

This offering also comes with the new Optimizely Graph, based on GraphQL, a new way to transform CMS content into a form that can be queried to offer richer content search and delivery experiences. It is headless by design and is offered to Optimizely SaaS and PaaS customers. 

To learn more about Optimizely SaaS Core CMS and Optimizely Graph, visit Optimizely blog. 

Unsure which architecture to choose from? Need any guidance in creating an outstanding CMS authoring experience for your end users, to unlock their creativity? Feel free to contact us to talk with one of our Optimizely digital specialist. 

CMP Integration. Source: Optimizely

Optimizely Content Platform (CMP) is the backbone of the Optimizely One platform – allowing marketing teams to structure, organize and coordinate marketing activities and related content creation. It is based on the “Welcome” platform and is now fully integrated within the Optimizely ecosystem. This integration has been strengthened by allowing CMP users to schedule and publish content directly from the CMP to the CMS. Content can be created and enriched in the CMP and scheduled to be published to the CMS based on the marketing calendar. Furthermore, the integration allows CMS users to manage their digital assets (images, videos, etc.) using the CMP DAM – a much nicer way to manage, tag, organize and crop media files.  

Visual Builder 

The Visual Builder is bringing the CMS content creation experience to a new level, allowing users to edit and preview pages with drag and drop elements, and easily build their own templates, without any code. Elegant and intuitive, personalization is also embedded right into the editing experience, and it’s fully compatible with Optimizely Graph. Creating content has never been so enjoyable! The Visual Builder is still offered as a beta to both Optimizely CMS SaaS and PaaS customers and will be soon available to all customers. 

At Thinkmax, we truly believe in rich and integrated eCommerce experiences, leveraging content, state-of-the-art eCommerce engine, great UX experiences, personalization, and AI, among others. That’s all fueled by a strong and modern Digital Experience Platform, and Optimizely has been modernizing their Configured and Customized Commerce modules in 2024 to give us the required architecture to build those outstanding digital experiences. The diverse Commerce modules are being offered standalone in both Configured and Customized Commerce, allowing us to build a composable “best of both worlds” architecture by leveraging the composable modules that are the essential eCommerce functions now available out-of-the-box.  

In Q2 2024, Optimizely released the Payments composable commerce module. Leveraging the Spreedly Payment Platform, it gives access to Optimizely customers to more than 200 payment gateways for seamless regional, national, and international payments support. It also supports the expected security features such as two-factor authentication and 3DS support.  

New Promotions Engine 

Another composable module that is on the roadmap for future release is the new Promotion engine. Optimizely has been working on a whole new promotion engine with a much more advanced User Interface that will allow merchandizers to easily create new promotions for their online store by building the conditions and rewards using a query editor. No more development required to create new custom rules. This will unlock a lot of new use cases and allow marketing to roll out new promotions and experiment on those quickly. It will also include new reporting tools to visualize the effectiveness of the online store promotions. The future roadmap of that module includes a bunch of other exciting stuff, such as AI promotion recommendations and built-in experimentation. You can watch an early demo of that module as well as a preview of the future roadmap from the Opticon 2023 videos. 

You can learn more about the overall Optimizely Commerce roadmap on the Optimizely website. 

Google + Optimizely 

Last year at Opticon, Optimizely announced an innovation partnership with Google to leverage Google search & AI capabilities within the Commerce stack. This is exciting news, as it brings Google expertise to enhance the search capabilities within the Commerce modules, at no additional costs. As we heading towards the other half of 2024, those capabilities will start to roll out gradually in the upcoming releases, as beta for now. The first set of capabilities will allow AI to do translations automatically (with human approval). We will also be looking at the release of the new search engine, as well as Product Recommendations module, based on Google capabilities. You can watch online the Optimizely Commerce & Google partnership announcement from Opticon 2023. 

If you wish to rewatch Optimizely's 2024 product roadmap webinars, you can click here. If you have any questions about Optimizely's offerings and our services, feel free to contact us. 

Article written by Eric Deschambault, Senior Manager – Digital Business Consultants at Thinkmax. Eric is an Optimizely Most Valuable Professional (OMVP). 

Note: The features discussed may have changed or been updated after the article was published. Please refer to the official Optimizely website for more information.