Sitecore Symposium Recap 2024

Hello friends! I made it to the Sitecore Symposium in Nashville, TN last week. There's definitely excitement about the location, but for me—being from the South—I've been to Nashville several times before. Still, I can totally understand its allure, though I'm surprised by how it captivates people from halfway around the world.

This year's event was bittersweet for me. Having been part of the community for nearly a decade, it's my first event since leaving Sitecore—an unplanned departure. Consequently, I'm no longer an MVP, which feels strange after attending the MVP summit for 6 or 7 consecutive years (barring the COVID interruption). Attending without the MVP badge made me feel like just another developer at a conference. However, that feeling didn't last long. Being part of this community for so long, it truly didn't feel that way once I arrived. While I had these thoughts on my way to the event, the reality was quite different. It's astonishing how the content I've created for the Sitecore community has impacted so many developers. Numerous people approached me for photos, making me feel like a celebrity. This experience reinforces my commitment to continue contributing, though those who know me understand that I don't do it for the recognition—it's simply something I genuinely enjoy.

Let's break down the event. I'll start with the keynotes and then walk through every breakout session I attended, including screenshots (where applicable) from those sessions. For those who couldn't attend, I hope this blog will give you a glimpse into my week at Sitecore Symposium. As a disclaimer, I'm sure I'll miss some announcements or news from this action-packed event. Below are some great blogs that cover the event—check them out!

• Jeremy Davis - My post-Symposium wrap up (jermdavis.dev)
• https://blog.brandonbruno.com/posts/2024/10/some-thoughts-on-sitecore-stream-from-a-guy-who-demoed-it

FYI, this is a very long blog post!

Key Notes

The highlight of any conference is the keynote, and those by Dave O'Flannagan (CEO) and Roger Connelly (CPO) were truly standout moments. They introduced the newest addition to Sitecore's offerings—not quite a "product" in the traditional sense, but rather a series of copilot apps that, from my understanding, consume and access APIs from the composable products. This new service, called Stream, features copilot applications including campaign, ideation, and brand assistants. The brand copilot can ingest large amounts of brand-specific guidelines from PDFs and other documents. This information is then used to ensure that AI-generated content aligns with the organization's tone, voice, and other brand messaging guidelines.

Stream is a co-pilot orchestration service that enhances Sitecore's composable products with AI capabilities. This enables what Dave coined the Intelligent DXP—a concept that aligns perfectly with Sitecore's vision for the future of digital experiences.

Another highlight of the keynote came from Eric Stine, Sitecore's new Chief Operating Officer. He announced that all of Sitecore's composable products—XM Cloud, CDP, and Personalize—are now HIPAA compliant. This is a significant development for the healthcare industry, as it means Sitecore's composable products can now be used by healthcare customers without compliance concerns.

Katie Ledecky Guest Appearance

I’ve always been a big fan of Katie Ledecky, so this was a real treat. Honestly always feels so inspired by the Olympics as a whole and the athletes that give up their entire lives to dedicate and compete in an event that only happens every four years.

Wrap Up

Those were the key highlights from the main keynotes, but there was so much more to learn from this event, by attending the keynotes, lets learn more below. These are recapped information from each of the sessions I specifically attended, which obviously there are multiple options at any of the given time slots, so I’m sure I missed a lot. These sessions appealed to me and I’ll share why I wanted to attend them and anything useful I gained from them. I also ranked my top 3 sessions, where I gained a lot of useful information from the sessions.

Day 1 Sessions

Overall the first day breakout sessions were focused on AI, although most would argue that AI was a focus for most of the event, but as you’ll see I attended a very heavy dose of AI. There are reasons for this, being that I have been exploring deep into the topic of AI and more specifically exploring Generative AI. I do wonder however, how much value those that haven’t considered AI yet for their own needs, how useful this event may have been to them. Though I think most would need to be living under a rock, to not have thought about the potential applications of AI in their own careers.

Disrupting the experience with Generative AI

Presenter: Mo Cherif / Senior Director Generative AI, Sitecore

As I alluded to in the introduction for the day one sessions, I'm eager to learn all I can and gain additional insights about Sitecore's use of AI. I'm particularly interested in how they plan to implement the AI capabilities available in Stream across their products.

Honestly, this session wasn't as groundbreaking as I'd hoped, and I didn't gain much new information. From what I recall, it primarily focused on the evolution of Generative AI—from simple chat interfaces to more advanced function calling and tooling, and now towards Generative UI and agent-like interfaces. Mo walked us through these possibilities, but the content felt somewhat basic for those already familiar with AI trends.

How Sitecore builds with Vercel AI SDK

Presenter: Mo Cherif / Senior Director Generative AI, Sitecore Presenter: Malte Ubl / CTO, Vercel

I was particularly excited about this session as it covered the Vercel AI SDK, a tool I've been tinkering with lately. I was keen to see how Sitecore was leveraging this technology and to glean insights into their vision. However, the session stayed mostly at a high level. The first half primarily introduced the Vercel AI SDK. It's important to note that this isn't a product, but rather an SDK designed to help companies build Generative AI applications. As Malte explained during the presentation, Vercel had to figure out how to adapt to the AI landscape, and this SDK was their answer. For those unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend checking out this demo: Next.js Gemini Chatbot (vercel.ai). While I'd seen this before, it effectively showcases how tool-calling (or Function Calling) can be used with React (or RSC) to create AI-powered UIs with rich functionality. I'm planning to dive deeper into this topic soon, as I continue developing Version Two of my Sitecore Assistant app, which I've demoed at several User Group presentations.

While this session won't receive my highest rating due to its high-level approach, it was nonetheless valuable. Those unfamiliar with the Vercel AI SDK would likely have found this topic particularly enlightening. The session provided a solid introduction to a tool that's becoming increasingly relevant in the AI-driven development landscape.

Leveraging Sitecore Personalize with AI to craft dynamic user experiences

Presenter: Matt Richardson / Sitecore Platform Architect, Velir

TOP 3 Session

I attended this session on a whim, unsure what to expect based on the title. It turned out to cover two forms of AI within Sitecore Personalize. The first is Generative AI for creating experiences or content. The second, which I found particularly insightful, was Predictive AI. This fascinating subject isn't about generating content, but rather about identifying trends in vast amounts of data, building a custom model, and using it as a Connection with Sitecore Personalize. The session provided useful example cases for model training and steps to implement Predictive AI in your own project. As someone currently pursuing a Deep Learning certification, this presents an excellent use case for my studies. I'm looking forward to creating content on this topic next year—time permitting, of course.

Here is an example high-level architecture of what add a Predictive AI model, might look like when combined with Sitecore Personalize.

Next-gen frontend development with XMC

Presenter: Liz Nelson / Senior Director, Product, XM Cloud, Sitecore

This was my first of three sessions with Liz, and it stands out because it focused on giving developers more choices for their rendering hosts. The session covered simplifying the JSS library and reducing its complexity, allowing developers to extend it to work with other JavaScript frameworks/libraries or even other languages. Liz demonstrated deploying a site using Angular, and there was mention of a toolkit being developed for Go. While all of this was exciting, the session didn't provide specific examples of how someone would use or build their own framework. Below is more screenshots from Liz’s deck, which goes into a little more detail about the topics discussed in this session.

Sitecore Integrated AI Strategy

Presenter: Mo Cherif, Senior Director Generative AI, Sitecore

This was my third session by Mo in the same day, and honestly, in the blur, I don't remember much about it. As I mentioned for the previous two AI sessions by Mo, my reason for attending was to gain further insight into the vision for Stream and the rest of Sitecore's AI strategy. In retrospect, these sessions should have been spread out across the entire event rather than concentrated on a single day. I've presented multiple sessions in one day before, and even as a presenter, it can be challenging to distinguish between them. While these sessions covered slightly different aspects of AI, they were quite similar in many respects.

Later in Mo's presentation, he delved deeper into the data driving the insights. As I've begun learning about Generative AI, much of this section focused on data collection and how that data is sent to the LLM to generate insights. In most cases, this data was surfaced using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and vectorization. While I haven't explored these topics in great depth, it's fascinating to see Sitecore's thought process for addressing their AI challenges.

Day Two Sessions

The second day featured an intriguing array of sessions, though I found the morning offerings less engaging than I'd hoped. I'll be honest: after an intense night at the Horizontal party, I wasn't at my sharpest. This sluggishness might have contributed to my lukewarm reception of the morning sessions.

Day two kicked off with several keynotes, but I had some issues with the format. There were too many lengthy use case presentations on the main stage that didn't resonate with me personally, leaving me rather disengaged. I believe these would've been better suited as individual breakout sessions or condensed versions. The Guest Keynote by #1 Best-Selling Author Erik Qualman was decent, but I've experienced more impactful keynotes at other events. As a TED talk enthusiast who enjoys fresh perspectives, I found a few valuable insights from this presentation, but overall, it was just satisfactory.

Another significant announcement was the introduction of the "Red Jacket" for MVP. Initially, I was unsure if they were referring to the Sitecore MVP program, but that's precisely what it was. It appears to be a new tier in the MVP program, where one individual is honored as a "Red Jacket MVP." This reminds me of the green jacket from the Masters golf tournament. The award seems intended for outstanding MVPs who excel consistently, which explains why Klaus Petersen received the first jacket, having been an MVP for nearly the longest duration of any recipient. I'm curious about how this will work in future years and what the intentions behind this new honor are. Is it purely a marketing strategy, or are there other motivations behind this prestigious recognition?

Revolutionizing Sitecore.com: Building an enterprise website on XM Cloud for speed and efficiency

Presenter: Alison Sainsbury / Senior Director, Digital Experience, Sitecore Presenter: Derek Hunziker / Director, Digital Technology, Sitecore

I attended this session on a whim, as I mentioned in the day two introduction. The morning sessions were a toss-up for me, with few that piqued my interest. This particular session, which covered the overhaul I was familiar with from my time at Sitecore, turned out to be quite informative. Apparently, there were several sessions about the Sitecore.com transition to XM Cloud. This one focused on lessons learned during the migration and some content migration aspects. I believe the entire series would be valuable for customers considering a move to XM Cloud. However, attending just this single session felt a bit disjointed, as they referenced many other related sessions—both past and upcoming—that I hadn't planned to attend.

Sitecore Search and B2B Scale: Raven Industries

Presenter: Jared Arnofsky / Senior Sitecore Architect, Americaneagle.com Presenter: Richard Seal / Principle Partner Technical Advisor, Sitecore

I attended this session on a whim, as none of the other concurrent sessions particularly appealed to me. Overall, the presentation offered an excellent showcase of Sitecore Search's capabilities and flexibility. While there weren't many sessions covering Sitecore Search, I found this topic less helpful or informative for my current needs, as I'm not working with any clients using this product at the moment.

Sitecore XM Cloud R&D Roadmap

Presenter: Liz Nelson / Senior Director, Product | XM Cloud, Sitecore

TOP 3 Session

This was one of the best because it highlighted alot of vision of where they plan to go. Key takeaways is that Pages should have feature parity with Experience Editor soon, which will allow them to deprecate this feature in XM Cloud. There will be a 6 month grace period of course, but it’s great I think for everyone to see this feature finally come to an end, and I’m sure this will enable better flexibility in the future. Also this covered the AI features coming to the product and the ability to add extensibility to the product. I get a little confused which of her sessions she originally discussed extensibility, but there are plans to allow the Rendering host application to add more ways to add customizations directly into the Pages UI. Also there will be ways to extend, possibly via IFRAME, to add custom UI’s throughout the application. In this session she also covered (again) the desire for head framework choice (which was covered in another session in day one).

Screenshots

Introducing Sitecore’s Marketplace

Presenter: Anastasia Plati / Product Marketing, Sitecore Presenter: Krassi Eneva / Senior Product Manager, Sitecore

TOP 3 Session

Honestly, this session was one of the main reasons I wanted to attend Symposium. When I saw it on the agenda, I hoped it would be similar to other Marketplace or App Libraries offered by some providers, where you can build applications and add them to the Cloud Portal. This concept sounds really promising, and I already have a few ideas for apps (which you'd know if you've read some of my other blogs, such as the one about a Personalize assistant). However, it feels like there are still many details to be worked out. To give you a better idea, I've included a ton of screen captures below:

Sitecore CDP: Unlock your data with unified tracking

Presenter: Derek Fahey, Director of Product Management, Sitecore

For me, this session was great. I wish more of the sessions had gone this route, where the session was packed full of useful information about a specific product (instead of splitting the topic into a ton of different sessions). Like I mentioned a bunch was covered, including the new Session Traits, which is a real time ability to store more information back to the Guest Profile on session end, I’ll likely cover this topic soon, since it has great uses for the Behavioral Personalization topic I have covered earlier this year. There was also mention that Profile Traits/Attributes is in the works. These would look at the entire Guest and all their sessions and make determinations on the user information. These would be preset fields, but more could be built in the future. I’m guessing these take a considerable higher amount of processing to calculate, since they are looking at not only the current session and events, but rather the entire guest profile.

There was also alot of talk about Unified tracking with the Cloud SDK. First it will support Web Experience in Personalize really soon (I can’t remember exactly the timeline that was mentioned, but it sounded like it would be really soon). There will also be support for Sitecore Search, and using the Cloud SDK, will not require XMC. So If you were using Search only.

Day Three Sessions

Unfortunately this was the last day of the conference, it is amazing how fast these conferences end. The night before was the Symposium party and was another rough night, but probably not as rough (because I took it a little easier on the drinks than I had the night before). This was also the last day in Nashville, since I was headed home later in the day. It’s weird how I had met hundreds of folks from around the community, but there were several folks that I just didn’t have the time to spend much time with. It’s weird how that happens.

But I also was very drained after a whirlwind at the event, so even though I didn’t really want the conference to end, good things sometimes need to come to an end, so you can get back to your own life.

Product Previews

I thoroughly enjoyed these product previews as they offered a glimpse into the distant future. One item that particularly piqued my interest was a feature shown for Sitecore Personalize—a campaign-like interface. It resembled a form of marketing automation being considered for the product. While this is clearly a long-term vision, it's definitely something to keep an eye on. I found the overall concept of presenting live product demos on the main stage to be excellent. It's a fantastic way to reignite excitement about the products.

Closing Keynotes

The closing keynotes continued with a fireside chat featuring Brendan Hunt. I've never watched Ted Lasso and I'm not sure if I will, so the presentation felt average to me. I didn't gain much from it. Afterward, the event officially wrapped up with the announcement of drawings and giveaways. Oddly, there were still breakout sessions scheduled after the official end. Some of these post-wrap sessions were actually great, which seemed strange. It gave the impression that Sitecore was implying these sessions weren't important, essentially saying, "You can go home now." These final sessions might have been more community or developer-focused, but I'm not sure that's the right approach to take.

One notable omission from the closing keynote was any mention of next year's event location. We'll have to wait and see if and where Symposium might take place in 2025. If Symposium doesn't occur, I suspect there will be another SUGCON NA to fill the gap.

Getting Started with ASP.NET Core and XM Cloud -

Presenter: Rob Earlam / Head of Developer Advocacy, Sitecore

I attended Rob Earlam's session, who was my former colleague and eventually my boss while I worked at Sitecore. It was a great pleasure seeing him again at this event, and given his passion for .NET development, this was an excellent session. I was already aware that they had open-sourced the .NET SDK and started a starter kit similar to the Foundation Head repository for Next.js, so that topic wasn't entirely new to me. However, I gained a few valuable insights. First, I learned how simple it is to build your rendering host with .NET. Another useful tidbit was about customers who want to stay with Azure. Their best choice might be to build with .NET, because Azure is currently not recommended as a hosting provider for Next.js due to its limitations. Because of this, it's really worth considering building with .NET if you have to host with Azure. Of course, there are trade-offs with .NET, including the fact that it's all server-side, and you can't take advantage of Static Site Generation like you can with Next.js. But overall, it was still a great session.

XM Cloud Experience and AI: A roadmap and demo

Presenter: Liz Nelson

Another session by Liz stood out, as did all of her presentations. This one was particularly forward-looking, exploring the potential applications of AI in creating experiences. The key takeaway was Sitecore's consideration of how AI could assist or potentially replace certain aspects of a strategist's or marketer's role in the future. While I believe this vision might be a bit too futuristic, I do think that AI will eventually be able to assist with website strategy and marketing processes, despite their complexity. However, I don't see this full integration happening in the immediate future.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a fantastic event where I had the opportunity to learn more about Sitecore's latest vision. I noticed that Sitecore seems to have a clearer direction now than ever before, especially since embracing the composable approach. However, it's important to remember that these events are designed to generate excitement for Sitecore. While some announcements may materialize soon, much of what's presented is simply a vision. It remains to be seen how many of these ideas will actually come to fruition.

Another concern I had with this event was that it likely didn't appeal to 85-90% of XP/XM customers who are content with their current setup. Much of the discussion raised worries about XM Cloud potentially adding more features and infrastructure requirements, which could push prices even further out of reach for these customers. This might lead them to consider alternative SaaS CMS options in the future. While these are significant concerns, the event wasn't designed to address them directly. It'll be fascinating to see how this roadmap and its features unfold for existing XP/XM customers.