Keynote Recap: Opticon 2023 San Diego

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This time last week, we hosted 1000+ digital leaders from across the Optimizely ecosystem in sunny San Diego as we put on our flagship Opticon event. I wanted to take this chance and offer some commentary on the major announcements, in case you missed it!

First up, our fearless leader Alexander Atzberger unveiled Optimizely One, the operating system for marketers, growth teams, and all digital practitioners. If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t work harder ???, market better ??, launch faster ??, grow stronger ??… the lack of a cohesive workflow should be your prime suspect. Your teams are spending too much time attending soul-draining check-in meetings , alt-tabbing across who knows how many applications that don’t actually work with each other, with no one having visibility on anything across the entire organization.

Worry no longer! Today, some of the world’s largest enterprises have chosen Optimizely to eliminate “work about work” with thousands of concurrent users crushing it every ?? single ?? day ??. Read more about this in this press coverage from Myles Suer and our own press release here. Side note while we're talking about Alex: if you missed the after-party, never ever challenge him to a one-handed push up contest, you’ll lose.

Next, Rupali Jain (hi boss ??) answered one of the most pressing topics in digital experiences today: how do you balance the flexibility of composability (a preference for developers who look to future-proof their stack ??) with the simplicity of workflows (a preference for practitioners who want to spend more time doing and less time herding software cats, ??). Well turns out, you absolutely can! No sacrifices. You can have your cake ?? and eat it too.

With our new SaaS Core for CMS ? (sitting alongside our award-winning PaaS Core), our massive investment in Graph ? (supporting external data sources, AI-powered search OOTB), and new Visual Builder ? (works across content and commerce use cases), customers have the broadest breadth of options for how they can compose the best CMS for their needs. The best part? Practitioners are not left in the cold as the workflow sitting “on top” remains smooth and seamless no matter the architectural opinion or how the composition happens “below” within the stack.

We brought this point home on the main stage (showed off by Jacob Khan and yours truly with our matching red kicks) with two out of the hundreds of thousands of ways (yes I did the factorial math ??) you can compose Optimizely One to your needs: the first showing plan + experiment and the second showing create + layout + deliver + experiment.

That's the reason Josh Schoonmaker was giving out Lego kits in some of his sessions: Optimizely One is the image on the box, what you do with the pieces is up to you.

It’s 2023 and AI is heating up ??, with Optimizely right up there leading the charge. Alex challenged the audience with the real question of whether leaders will seize the moment and lead as AI augments humans with superpowers ?? that seem impossible just a few years ago. Take a few main stage guests as examples: Dan Siroker who seeks to give humans perfect memory with Limitless (side note: super super cool to have the original co-founder of Optimizely back at Opticon), or Kevin Chung who seeks to give enterprises a safe and secure way to unlock the value of generative AI with Writer (we announced our partnership with Writer on stage). As I bantered with Greg Kihlstrom for a podcast recording on-site (now live!): humankind didn’t wake up and invent AI in 2023 (and that’s certainly true at Optimizely) but it sure feels a little different this time given how widespread and powerful the use cases are.

To that end, we’ve also made a big splash in this space with the launch of Opal, our overarching identity for everything AI-related here at Optimizely to accelerate the outcomes you desire across insight, workflows, and personalization, just to name a few use cases. Our approach to AI (generative and dare I say “traditional” AI/ML ??) remains the same as before: to deliver real, tangible value via the pragmatic application of AI infused into your existing workflows as much as possible. Need some help solving the blank page problem for a new piece of content? ? We got your back, with "human in the loop" governance built directly into the workflow. Need a few variations for a CTA to test? ? It’s right there in our visual editor within Web Experimentation.

This year was super special for me personally as the journey that started as Idio, to Episerver, to Optimizely with quite a few acquisitions along the way culminated in a significant milestone moment for the company. If you weren’t able to join us last week in San Diego, please do sign up and check out the virtual event we have planned (no lobster rolls for you though ??) and we cannot wait to see all of you in London and Stockholm in the weeks to come. To the entire Optimizely community of customers, partners, analysts, and of course, all my Optimizers: move fast and make things. Momentum is on our side. ??