Once again I had to enjoy a SUGCON from the comforts of home, but thanks to a few folks sharing photos I got to feel a little bit of the excitement of the event. I’ve gathered together some photos and notes from the community during Day One of SUGCON in Dublin, Ireland! You can find Day Two updates in the next blog post!

Photo credits by various community members: Rick Bauer, Jacqueline Baxter, James H, Koen Heye, Kamruz Jaman, Neil Killen, Nicole Montero, Rasmus Kirkegaard Mortensen, Peter Nazarov, Sumit Upadhyay, Serge van den Oever, Swaralee Wad, Sebastian Winter

Kicking off the event!

The SUGCON opening keynote from Sitecore CEO Dave O’Flanagan made a firm statement that XM/XP are going nowhere! XP 10.4 will be released this month, with plans for 10.5 already underway.

• The XP roadmap themes: Better UX for Marketers, Better DX for Developers, Composable Integrations.
• 10.4 Highlights: Simplified personalization management, Composable integrations and analytics, Improved security, over 200 features and enhancements

Dave O’Flanagan continued with roadmap highlights of the composable DXP. XM/XP as part of your hybrid SaaS solution? More AI in everything? Dave’s vision for the future of digital experience is a call to action for innovation and transformation.

The buzz about AI

Roger Connolly, Sitecore Chief Product Officer (CPO), took over the stage with a look at where the product was going to be heading in the months and years ahead. A big focus was on integrating AI throughout products and thinking about the marketer workflow across the stack, not within each product. How does it get easier to accelerate teams?

There was a great story here about bringing the creative flow together and keeping a product on brand. Imagine an organization importing the brand kits and style guides. Then, those imported guidelines can restrict what AI tools generate so that they create content that matches your corporate style, tone and voice. This is going to be huge!

Connecting it all together

Long-time Sitecore leader Pieter Brinkman (aka my boss) took to the stage to show off some new XM Cloud capabilities in an amazing live demo that featured XM Cloud Forms, Connect, Send, OpenAI, and jsonStorage all brought together to help people win prizes! It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of developer work up front to unlock capabilities for the marketing team.

The demo featured a Wheel of Fortune raffle where attendees could participate by completing a form. The demo was built live from scratch, showcasing the power of a composed solution and of low-code options for marketers.

The demo included:

• Creation of a landing page and form with XM Cloud
• Form data handling through Sitecore Connect
• Validation of form input with OpenAI
• Name storage at jsonstorage.net
• Creating a subscriber in Sitecore Send

The future of DevEx

Liz Nelson, the Product Manager lead for Sitecore XM Cloud, took to the stage to talk about the future of developer experience. Sitecore is looking at ways to shift to a framework agnostic approach so that you can build with whichever framework you need to. A project is also underway to look at collaborating with Frontend Masters to provide frontend training to community members. It’s time to have more options for developers!

Behavioural personalization with Personalize

My Sitecore colleague Dylan Young has been working on some really cool stuff for building XP-like persona personalization in Personalize. His SUGCON presentation showed off how you can track what people are doing, determine their profile using Euclidean distance, and then personalize to them based on that.

Along with his presentation, Dylan published a few resources:

• Enabling Sitecore Personalize Web Experiences on XM Cloud
• Sitecore Search User Profile Personalization with Personalize
• Comparing Personalization Options for Sitecore Personalize when Building with Sitecore

The ‘Personal’ in ‘Personalization’

Vaishali Dialani had a SUGCON session on CX and Personalization and talked about generating feelings at the right moment in the journey. Creating the right experience involves emotions and there is no ‘personalization’ without ‘personal’!

Making the easy button with AI

The marketing track at SUGCON closed off with a discussion on AI to make things easier for teams to get to “done”. Rick Bauer and Corey Smith talked about tonality control for executives and the importance of governance for teams when adding AI into your work stream. In the show and tell portion, Sitecore Content Hub OPS and Connect came out to play!

Coming together

I found a few shots from before and during the event that I thought were really nice!