AI and the future of CMS with Liz Nelson

Note: Video transcript has been edited to provide a summary of this episode.

Sean Broderick (Sean): Hey everybody, welcome to Digital Visionaries, a brand-new video series from Sitecore that seeks to shine a light on how brands, marketers, and technologists are building for a new area in digital experience. I'm so delighted to be joined by Liz Nelson, our Senior Director of Product Management for the XM Cloud Group at Sitecore. She is not just one of the greatest voices in CMS market, but in martech as well. Liz, thanks so much for joining me.

Liz Nelson: Thank you, Sean.

Sean: It's wonderful to have you here in Dublin. I know that you're a recent transplant to Dublin. Tell us a little bit about your product management journey and your journey to where you are in Sitecore today.

Liz Nelson: Incredibly new to Dublin. Two weeks now. I joined Sitecore very recently actually, about a year and a half ago as a headless CMS consultant. From there, I joined the product group as a developer experience product manager. And in April [of 2024] I took over the XM Cloud group.

Sean: I think your experience in AI is particularly relevant in the age we're in today. How do you see that journey from a CMS perspective from someone who is intricately knowledgeable in that space?

Liz Nelson: When we look at AI, first and foremost you start to think about content generation. We see AI and we see models that are phenomenal at generating content. So, the first place we go is content generation, but we've been thinking so much about how this is going to affect the way we store content, retrieve content, discover our own content. From a content management perspective, we think about our customers who have huge stores of their enterprise’s content that oftentimes lies undiscovered. They lose sight of their content over time because there's just too much of it. It's a reservoir of their own value that is oftentimes lost to the depth of that lake.

What I do know is that this world we're headed into is a world where AI is a deep part of our lives. You're going to be leveraging AI in your content management systems. You're going to be leveraging AI to build content, to find content, to create content out in all of your channels, to run your campaigns in your workflows.

Sean: When you're talking to customers and I know you've done many, both onsite visits with customers and virtual all over the USA, all over Europe, and APAC, what are they saying to you in terms of their requirements?

Liz Nelson: I think like they're dreaming along with all of us. They're dreaming of a world in which they can personalize to their audiences more, where they can discover and find their content, where they can tap into their own enterprise knowledge in a better, more efficient way, and where they can do more with less for their marketing teams. I think where they can differentiate in their industry and be the visionary in their space comes with being creative, thinking first, and trying things out and experimenting.

Sean: XM Cloud is Sitecore's fastest selling product ever, due in no small part to the phenomenal work that you and the team have been doing. How do you see the product evolving, knowing all of what your customers are asking you on a day-to-day basis?

Liz Nelson: We have a few strategies regarding AI, and regarding the future of content management. The first point we have honed in on is marketer owned technology. I also see the evolution of what we would call headless, where headless technology is a philosophy of delivery that allows for greater speed to market and better performance on the internet. But one of the challenges is that it kind of centers control to developers. That can be really powerful when you have a great IT team–if you're the kind of enterprise that is fully staffed with a strong development team – that's excellent. A lot of marketing teams don't have an organization like that, and their marketing team wants to have more power to make changes and push their brand without having to coordinate with developers to make changes all the time. They want to be empowered to change more and push more. Obviously, there's space for when and how to work and coordinate with developers–there are things you can't do without software and code.

Sean: That's a big shift for a lot of teams and organizations, right?

Liz Nelson: Yes. It's a big shift. And we think it can be done in a way that is still a lovely developer experience–because of AI. That's been a big focus of our developer experience and our philosophy of marketing in general is that the marketer should be the center of control. XM Cloud is a place where a marketer can feel empowered to drive their brand vision.

Sean: Talk about how important embedded personalization is inside of a CMS, whether that's with XM Cloud, or otherwise.

Liz Nelson: This is a key initiative for us. It’s really hard for a lot of marketers to get started with personalization for a lot of reasons. We've talked to tons and tons of customers, and we've engaged with so many folks. Sometimes it's because you have a certain budget to get your site running, and personalization is the thing that gets descoped. You put that off and then you've lost the digital strategy team that you've engaged to help you. And so, the marketer is left on their own with no strategy team to assist them toward a first engagement with personalization products. That’s been a primary goal for us recently–how to take those first steps into personalization.

Sean: Yeah. I think that's the key point here as well. One of our esteemed colleagues, Jacqueline Baxter, our Director of Content here at Sitecore, talks about approvals being where great stuff goes to die. Whereas if you have all these personalization options, you can figure out which works best and you're taking it beyond the realm of opinion and then into something that has hard data behind it. I think that's really key.

Liz Nelson: This is a really great point for two reasons. So, one is we've recently launched A/B testing in XM Cloud. All of our AI suggestions automatically can deploy A/B testing, so you can test out whether or not any of these suggestions are valid or not and, get some data behind it very quickly, make sure that any of these things are worth investing in and, roll on. Talking about approvals, this brings me to Sitecore Stream. One of my favorite things about Sitecore Stream is Sitecore Stream Orchestrate, which is a set of campaign management, task and project management capabilities, as well as workflow management capabilities. These capabilities actually have a deep integration with XM Cloud, including collaboration capabilities. If you need human governance, it's right there. There are tons of enterprises who are absolutely going to need human oversight into anything generated with AI. And so, if you need workflows set up so that AI creation always has human eyes on it with flows and approvals, that’s in place. User collaboration, great task management tools, all of that comes with XM Cloud and these lovely ways that are AI empowered for human and AI agents to work in great collaboration. We've been just so excited about this nonstop collaboration with the Sitecore Stream team.

Sean: What are you most excited about? You've outlined how the workflow is going to integrate with XM Cloud. When it comes to Sitecore Stream, how is that going to augment XM Cloud and the overall CMS experience at Sitecore?

Liz Nelson: Sitecore Stream is deeply integrated into XM Cloud. One of the things that will be released quite soon is content generation and brand intelligence, and specifically variant improvement features. With Sitecore Stream, I now have all that intelligence about my brand. All of that content generation is now super rooted in that learn service. One of the strengths of Sitecore Stream is this notion of enterprise intelligence, brand intelligence, code intelligence. And as these intelligence services are being built in Stream and they surface through into XM Cloud, you can leverage the knowledge of your own enterprise, directly inside of XM Cloud. Sitecore Stream’s Orchestrate application has a native integration in XM Cloud. All of the collaboration tooling, task management and campaign management–I love how that orchestrate aspect goes across all of our products.

Sean: Liz, you lead the XM Cloud group at Sitecore, maybe give a plug for some of the new things that you're thinking about for XM Cloud.

Liz Nelson: I have so many favorite new things, it's hard to decide. I want to say something I think is foundational and interesting about the design library. In the realm of content management, we have thought about content and digital assets. But the way we think about design library is that there's this third top level domain, and that is what we call the design asset. And we are treating it with the respect that it deserves as a third top level asset, where it is this odd combination of things–where it's a design file, design presentation asset, and part content and part code, and because it's these three things and that triad of designer and marketer and developer, it has a unique domain. We've created a whole application and interface and space for it to elevate it to the third realm of a content management system. And we've been talking to our customers about this. And I think one of our customers said, “I feel seen”, which was a really validating comment in general. I think it's resonating with people, and we're really excited for the launch of it. In our page building application, we are about to launch a series of analytics and personalization tooling that's built in. Our goal with the pages application is to make it the best experience and optimization building tool on the market. I think we're really hitting that. And lastly, we have a really cool set of developer frameworks that are coming out. We call them Leaner Modern Starter Kits. It's an expansion of framework support, all kinds of new modern meta frameworks. The way in which our developer customers have responded to it has been really incredible.

Sean: I love hearing how you break it down. We are marketer focused, but continuing to deliver for our developer audience as well. I love that.

Sean: This has been the Digital Visionary series. Liz, thanks so much for joining me on the couch today.

Liz Nelson: Thank you so much, Sean.