Sitecore unveils SitecoreAI: Open, agentic orchestration arrives for the CMS era

Sitecore used this year’s Symposium in Orlando to introduce SitecoreAI, a next-generation take on the digital experience platform that places agentic orchestration at the centre of content operations.

As Eric Stine put it on stage, "You can’t publish content for the next generation using yesterday’s playbook". The message was clear: this is about changing how work gets done, not just adding more AI features.

SitecoreAI is a single platform that unifies content, data and personalisation in a SaaS model, then layers on Agentic Studio, where marketers, technologists and AI work side by side. Out of the box, Agentic Studio includes a set of pre-built Sitecore agents (20 in total) for planning, content creation, testing and optimisation, and it also lets teams design their own agents and flows using visual tools, no code required.

For existing Sitecore CMS (formerly XM Cloud) customers, adoption is deliberately low friction. Agentic Studio runs on top of your environment with continuity of content and data, so teams can begin experimenting with agent-driven workflows without a major replatform. For organisations still on on-premise XM or XP, the new Sitecore Pathway tool uses AI-powered migration flows to automate content and schema conversion and accelerate the move to Sitecore CMS and the SitecoreAI stack. Support for automated migration from third-party CMS platforms is on the roadmap and expected to follow soon.

Gradial plays a more specific role in the story. Inside SitecoreAI, content planning, creation and personalisation are handled by Sitecore-built agents running in Agentic Studio. Gradial becomes relevant when those orchestrated flows need to extend into the wider enterprise, for example, coordinating agents that understand systems such as Salesforce or Jira. Combined with Content Hub, Stream and the Marketplace SDK, Sitecore’s path over the last few years now reads as a clear build-up to an agentic DXP (or #AEX).

What happened in Orlando

During the keynote, Sitecore set out a practical vision: agentic capabilities embedded where marketers already work. Agentic Flows coordinate multi-step campaigns from briefing to experimentation, publishing and ongoing optimisation, while Spaces provide shared context so people and agents can collaborate with visibility and control. The emphasis was not “AI for AI’s sake”, but measurable outcomes, faster content delivery, improved conversion and a cleaner operating model for global estates.

The numbers behind XM Cloud set the tone. A recent Total Economic Impact study reported a 371% ROI over three years, a 50% improvement in digital conversion rates by year three, a 60% increase in marketing productivity and a 40% reduction in developer time on website operations. Those gains now power SitecoreAI’s promise: move faster, personalise at scale and spend time where it counts.

Agentic orchestration, explained

If you’re new to the term, agentic orchestration is simply the coordination of specialised AI agents, each with a defined role, across the content lifecycle. Think of a production team operating inside your CMS:

• Agents sense goals, brand rules and performance signals.
• They plan a flow from brief to publish to optimisation.
• They act on discrete tasks: writing, page building, tagging, QA and experimentation.
• People review and approve within a shared workspace.
• The system learns and optimises based on real-time feedback.

In practice, that means turning a campaign brief into on-brand copy and components, running accessibility and compliance checks, launching personalisation experiments and promoting winners without creating new silos or adding headcount. It also means using agents to monitor content staleness, search performance, geo-variants and technical regressions so teams spend less time firefighting and more time shaping outcomes.

Why this matters if you’re evaluating a DXP

For organisations actively comparing platforms, SitecoreAI shifts the conversation from features to operational impact. The value is not just in generating content; it’s in running the entire content and personalisation loop as a governed, observable workflow. If you’re already on Sitecore CMS, you gain agentic capabilities without a migration. If you’re not, Sitecore Pathway and the surrounding migration agents reduce risk and compress timelines, particularly useful for multi-brand portfolios with legacy templates and inconsistent taxonomies.

Commercially, Sitecore is simplifying licensing around AI. Rather than credit-based systems or fragmented add-ons, SitecoreAI is sold as an all-you-can-eat AI layer priced on a single metric tied to Sitecore CMS (page views). Any SitecoreAI customer gets access to the full set of AI capabilities, with Sitecore 360 packaging it as part of a broader value bundle rather than a separate, metered service. That simplifies planning and speeds up experimentation because teams can switch on agents where they create value, not where licensing thresholds allow.

How Sitecore compares to the market

The wider DXP landscape is moving towards agent-driven models, and competitors have showcased compelling demos of their own. Sitecore’s differentiation is its end-to-end approach: agentic creation tied to migration, governance and personalisation, delivered inside a composed SaaS platform most teams already know. It’s ready to go out of the box, but also composable with custom apps, the marketer MCP server and bespoke agents. It’s less a bolt-on and more a re-wiring of how work gets done.

Our take as Sitecore CMS specialists

This was a major announcement from Sitecore and a clear marker of where the platform is heading. We’re genuinely excited about the change and are already diving deep into the capabilities that have been announced, while keeping a keen eye on the detail as more features arrive. Most of all, we’re excited to build solutions for our customers in this new era of agentic and extensible SaaS.

You don’t need a big-bang transformation to realise value. Start with a single, revenue-relevant journey, product launch pages or a seasonal campaign. Enable a small set of agents for briefing, page assembly, QA and personalisation. Set clear guardrails for brand, compliance and data handling. Measure content velocity and conversion deltas. Then scale to migration agents for the properties that will benefit most from consolidation.

Agentic is the future. Agentic is the way. It will not replace human endeavour, and it will not replace human creativity, which is why, at Think Fresh Digital, the intersection of technical mastery and creative thinking has always been at the core of how we deliver.