Key Insights from Symposium 2024 - What's Next for Sitecore's Content Hub?

Written by: Lance Hayden, Digital Strategist at RDA

Sitecore Symposium is wrapping up, and we've gotten lots of great insights into their roadmap for the future of their content operations and digital asset management with Content Hub. Let's take a look at some of the things on the roadmap that we can expect over the next year. I do want to point out that like any good roadmap, timelines and features are subject to change.

The standout feature in my mind will be the integration with Sitecore's other announcement, Sitecore Stream, an add-on to the Sitecore digital experience platform as a brand-aware AI that will integrate natively with all Sitecore products. Read more about our thoughts on that announcement here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/rdadigital_stream-sitecoremvp-activity-7252754634534985728-4XHz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Sitecore Stream will enable key AI experiences within the Content Hub platform, including semantic search (such as, "show me all images that have lime flavoring" versus traditional faceted and full-text searches. This is a powerful use case for enabling more generalized users to get the most out of Content Hub, without having to have a good grasp of your current DAM's taxonomy or a deep understanding of the tool.

The other thing Stream enables is a brand-aware AI to facilitate campaigns and content. Though Sitecore is being careful to not lean too much into the idea of AI generating all your content or images, they are definitely promoting the usage of AI to help brainstorm ideas and get content creation processes kickstarted using an AI that is trained on your brand. Obviously "brand-aware" is vague, but from my understanding, you'll have the chance to upload things like brand guidelines, design systems, tone and voice guidelines, and more as source documents to fine-tune the AI to make sure outputs from the Stream AI tool line up with your brand. My hope is that in its final state, the brand-aware aspect of Stream can automatically pull from content and assets in Content Hub and XM Cloud automatically to understand the brand without the need for manual user intervention.

Perhaps the most exciting feature they showed off was automated tagging. Having AI automatically suggest new taxonomy items based on your content or assets is great, but bulk tagging of assets and content based on your own current taxonomy will be an absolute game-changing feature for the platform. One of the biggest hurdles to a successful implementation of a new DAM is the application of a newly defined (or refined) domain model against existing assets. Many organizations with tens of thousands of assets could spend upwards of hundreds of (very boring) hours tagging existing images, documents, and content. Automated tagging functionality is a giant shortcut to getting existing assets into the system and saves time on future asset ingestion as well. I'm unsure of whether this functionality is tied to Stream or whether it will be natively done within the platform, but either way, it's an existing step forward for streamlined DAM usage.

Other non-Stream enhancements on the roadmap include improved visibility of user actions, such as a great visibility into mass jobs and better error messages for failed jobs. I'm particularly excited about updates to the Public Collections app that will allow for greater flexibility in how assets can be exposed to non-seated users, such as outside agencies or contractors. From talking with some Content Hub folks after the roadmap session, the updates seem to focus around allowing full-text and faceted search components on public pages. This would be a massive improvement for larger collections of assets. Mass edit flow updates are also intriguing - changes here could make bulk tagging updates for assets much easier, though I'm unsure of exactly what this roadmap feature entails.

There's a lot to be excited about for the future of Content Hub. It's clear that they are leaning into Content Hub's strengths with the roadmap, including "total extensibility" and "bespoke for every business". The sheer level of customization and scope of integrations that can be created makes it a compelling choice for marketers interested in adding a DAM to their marketing stack. If you're interested in what a DAM can do for your organization, reach out to us and chat about the future of content operations and assets using Content Hub.