Vertical AI and agentic orchestration: why SitecoreAI and Gradial are redefining intelligent DXP

Digital experience teams are under more pressure than ever.

Campaign cycles are faster, channels have multiplied, and the volume of content needed to achieve meaningful personalisation continues to grow.

Yet the real bottleneck sits upstream, in planning, briefing, approvals, asset creation, and orchestration across disconnected tools and sometimes disconnected agency partners.

This is exactly where horizontal AI solutions fall short, and where vertical AI platforms, like SitecoreAI supported by Gradial, deliver transformational value.

Understanding the difference: horizontal vs vertical AI

Before looking at the impact on DXPs, it’s worth defining two fundamentally different AI approaches.

Horizontal AI: broad but shallow

Horizontal AI models, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar, are trained for broad capability.

They excel at general reasoning, conversation, and high-volume tasks.

They are brilliant starting points but lack the deep contextual understanding required for regulated, process-heavy or domain-specific workflows.

They move fast, but they don’t understand your organisation, your data models, your governance, or the nuance of how marketing and content operations actually work.

Vertical AI: deep, specialised, enterprise-ready

Vertical AI platforms are built for a specific domain, marketing operations, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, trained on the workflows, rules, terminology, and governance of that space.

Because they are rooted in specialised data and high-value use cases, they deliver:

• Higher accuracy
• Fewer errors
• Better auditability
• Proper alignment to enterprise workflows
• Faster time-to-value

In short: vertical AI is where meaningful business impact happens.

This distinction matters profoundly for DXPs, where the goal is not just to generate content but to plan, orchestrate, create, approve, publish, and optimise.

Why DXPs need vertical AI to unlock intelligent experiences

1. Upstream is where the inertia lives

Content planning, brief creation, ticket management, stakeholder reviews, and production workflows consume disproportionate time and budget.

Teams jump between JIRA, Figma, DAMs, CMSs, approval queues, third-party agencies, spreadsheets and ad-hoc tools.

Horizontal AI may help with individual tasks, but it cannot coordinate the entire chain.

Vertical AI platforms plug directly into these complex operational patterns and handle the nuance.

2. True hyper-personalisation requires deep context

Hyper-personalisation isn’t achieved by writing personalised copy; it depends on aligning:

• Audience segments
• Behavioural intent
• Product data
• Brand guidelines
• Compliance rules
• Channel formats
• Real-time signals

Horizontal AI cannot reliably make sense of this without significant manual supervision.

Vertical AI, integrated into the DXP and trained on domain data, can.

3. Better outcomes across speed, cost, quality and top-line performance

By reducing friction and eliminating operational lag, vertical AI platforms deliver measurable improvements:

• Speed: campaigns, landing pages and assets created and approved significantly faster
• Cost: reduced reliance on manual tasks, agency hours and rework
• Quality: consistent brand, compliance and structural accuracy
• Top line: faster campaign velocity and higher-performing personalised journeys

This isn’t about incremental enhancement; it’s about finally fixing the operational bottlenecks that have held digital teams back for years.

SitecoreAI: the intelligent foundation for enterprise content and experience

SitecoreAI is built to act as the intelligent layer across the DXP, focusing on planning, creating and optimising content.

Crucially, it is open and flexible. Enterprises can:

• Bring their own models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini)
• Integrate custom agents
• Build specialised workflows in Agentic Studio
• Avoid vendor lock-in while expanding capability through the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

This openness means SitecoreAI acts as the composed intelligence layer, not a monolith.

Composable platforms give you flexibility, but they also require upfront effort. Teams must assemble, integrate, and test multiple vendor components before they can deliver value.

A composed platform, by contrast, comes pre-assembled and optimised from day one.

It’s engineered for performance out of the box, while still offering extensibility so you can add the tools you need.

It’s fair to say that, on the surface, it can feel like the industry is stuck in a loop—swinging between monoliths and composable architectures.

But this moment is different. SitecoreAI is SaaS without compromise, built for an agentic world where intelligence, automation, and orchestration are first-class capabilities.

With open extension points like MCP, the Agentic Studio, and the Marketplace / App Studio, it combines the stability of a composed foundation with the flexibility of a modern platform.

Where Gradial fits: mastering the upstream orchestration problem

Most marketing teams don’t struggle with writing copy; they struggle with everything around it:

• Tickets generated in JIRA
• Designs created in Figma
• Approvals routed through ServiceNow
• Assets stored in DAMs
• Editors updating CMS pages
• Campaigns repurposed manually across channels

Gradial is the missing orchestration layer.

It plugs into tools like JIRA, Wrike, Asana, Figma and the DXP to automate the tasks that neither horizontal AI nor the CMS can resolve alone.

Key Gradial use cases within SitecoreAI

Workflow automation: Automatically translate tickets into production-ready deliverables.

Campaign creation: Turn a campaign brief into emails, social posts, landing pages and microsites in minutes.

Content repurposing: Transform webinars, whitepapers or blogs into multi-channel, persona-specific content.

Personalisation at scale: Use vertical context and DXP intelligence to produce tailored variants at volume.

Gradial’s multi-modal engine chooses the right underlying AI model for the task, ensuring accuracy without adding operational complexity.

How SitecoreAI and Gradial work together

SitecoreAI = the content and experience intelligence layer: planning, ideation, optimisation, personalisation.

Gradial = the orchestration and execution layer: connecting workflows, automating tasks across enterprise tools, and ensuring everything reaches the DXP.

Together they create an intelligent, end-to-end marketing engine:

Brief → Asset → Approval → Personalisation → Publication → Optimisation

All accelerated, all compliant, all audited, all connected.

The outcome: enterprise-ready hyper-personalisation

With SitecoreAI and Gradial combined, organisations can finally achieve what they’ve been promised for years:

• The ability to produce massive content variation
• True 1:1 personalisation at scale
• Faster campaign cycles
• Better governance and compliance
• Reduced operational drag
• Clear ROI on content and DXP investment

This is the foundation for the next generation of marketing operations—intelligent, composable, and deeply integrated.