Unlocking the Future: Key Insights and Major Announcements from Sitecore Symposium 2025

Hello Friends—I'm back with my annual update from Sitecore Symposium, this year hosted near my house in Orlando, FL. Last year, I recapped all my sessions, but after attending this year, I realized that strategy doesn't make sense anymore. I didn't get much value from the breakout sessions. The keynotes delivered the big announcements, but I gained the biggest insights through MVP Summit and 1:1 conversations with product teams and the community. So I'll break down the event using all that 1:1 knowledge instead of sharing every session I attended. Let's get started.

The Big Announcement

Let's start with the biggest announcement from Sitecore Symposium 2025: the rebranding of Sitecore XM Cloud to SitecoreAI. I'll admit, I'm not sure I love the new name—it doesn't really describe it well, and it feels like they just want to stick AI in their branding. But that's not the real story. The big news, as Eric Stine described it, is that all the products will now be part of this new platform. Sitecore is building a unified DXP as a single cloud solution, bringing together CDP, Personalize, Content Hub, Search, and all the former XM Cloud products into one product. From a value proposition, this makes a ton of sense. It will really set Sitecore apart—especially from Optimizely. It'll take Optimizely years to catch up to this strategy, and customers will gain value quickly. While talking to the product team, I learned that Sitecore is positioned to enhance SitecoreAI fast, as they already have a huge roadmap of enhancements coming.

Unpacking Sitecore AI

This is where things get interesting. It took me a little while to process this big announcement and what it means. I think Sitecore's vision here is A+, but the path to that vision will be more complicated than it appears on the surface. Keep in mind this is my opinion, and I've tried my best to verify my understanding—though some details might be off. So what should you expect? On Monday, November 10, 2025, the rollout begins. As I understand it, Monday brings a few new features and a fresh UI. Sitecore XM Cloud customers will now see SitecoreAI instead, with a completely new interface. However, the underlying architecture won't have changed—any functionality that existed before Monday will still be there, just in a different place in the navigation.

On the main stage, they said all the products will become Sitecore AI, but it's actually a rebuild—taking features from other products built with different infrastructure and re-imagining them. This means there could be issues with features that worked fine before. It's also unclear whether a new customer who wants decision models, for example, can buy Personalize + Sitecore AI until those reach feature parity. The other thing is that I'm not sure how long it'll realistically take to reach feature parity—or if that will ever happen.

One last concern is what happens Monday morning for XM Cloud customers when they log in and find a radically new UI. Minor tweaks or a temporary way to revert to the old UI would be fine, but this change could cause significant confusion on day one for many users. People will adapt—that's the nature of SaaS—but I wish Sitecore had taken more time to consider the rollout and its impact on users. They're also rolling it out to some partners, but possibly not all. Partners could have prepared content to help customers, but in my opinion, Sitecore did a poor job of enabling the community of experts before this rollout.

One of the main reasons they're building everything under one roof is to make it easier and faster to develop new capabilities for the platform. In the age of AI, context is everything—and Sitecore wants to build a Knowledge Graph from all that combined data. It's not just about content. It's about metrics collected from the combined abilities of Search and CDP, then using that data to enable more automation with AI Agents.

AI

Sitecore wants to build AI capabilities into the product as a first-class citizen. They've integrated this throughout the application and built an Agentic AI platform consisting of Signals, Spaces, Flows, and Agents. You can build agents in the app using a workflow that reminds me of n8n—but a bit more deterministic. There's also the ability to bring in external AI Agents from third-party platforms, and they've already built several agents. I'll explore the AI Agentic tools in more detail after Monday, because this could really be a topic in its own right.

Sitecore Studio

The new Sitecore Studio consists of Agentic Studio (which I discussed above), App Studio, Marketplace, and Sitecore Connect. The two main additions are Marketplace and Agentic Studio.

Marketplace is finally being released—over a year after its announcement. Sitecore is positioning it as a way to build custom SaaS, which has always been the vision. You can add Marketplace apps for Sitecore AI as well. I had many conversations about the new Marketplace. It's a great opportunity for partners to build unique offerings that set them apart. However, there were many discussions around data protection, privacy, and how Sitecore will ensure a safe and secure Marketplace. The old Marketplace on Sitecore had many poorly maintained products. As a partner, this might be less likely—but I've worked for partners where even their own products lose support over time. How the Marketplace is shaped may become more of an issue in the future. Either way, I'm eager to work on it.

There was also the Hackerspace. I didn't participate since I've already built an app, but I learned that they were vibe coding the Marketplace apps—using MCP servers for Blok and other tools to help build marketplace apps faster. Most were simple, but it allowed more people to start playing around with the marketplace.

Content

I didn't attend the content-focused sessions at Symposium because I prefer focusing on the Experience side of the product. However, there were talks about the upcoming Content Service, which promises faster publishing times. There was also discussion about how Sitecore AI will eventually unify content services. For example, instead of having separate media libraries—one in the DAM from Content Hub and another in XM Cloud—there will eventually be a single storage location for media items.

Experience

As mentioned above, Sitecore AI will now include both CDP and Personalize capabilities. The team plans to rebuild these apps within Sitecore AI. One major challenge will be migrating the data lake (warehouse) from AWS to Azure. In Sitecore AI, this is now called the Unified Data Layer. This change brings exciting possibilities—they're re-imagining and doing their first major overhaul of the Boxever Data Lake. This means fewer references to the airline industry and a more flexible data layer. I don't have many details on the specifics yet, but since this is my focus, expect more content to come.

Search

Search is worth highlighting. During the main stage previews, they teased a common UI within Sitecore AI to manage indexed content. This would be a game changer for companies that need simple search for their websites. However, keep in mind these will be new search capabilities built directly with Azure within Sitecore AI. This could create challenges during the transition period—because some features will be available while others may take some time to appear back into the Sitecore AI platform.

Pathway

Pathway was another highly discussed feature. It allows content migration initially from Sitecore to Sitecore, though they mentioned it would eventually support any CMS to Sitecore AI. Some previews appeared on the main stage, but after many discussions, I got the sense it's still a long way off. That said, anything that speeds up migrations—even slightly—is promising. However, it will be built for Sitecore 360 customers, which may limit access for other Sitecore users. Interestingly, I was considering building a tool for this before Symposium, but now that might not make sense. The feature is more sophisticated than I initially thought—Mo Cherif's team is building it with AI to help map schemas from one platform to another. I'll be curious to see whether this continues development or fades away. It seems like every year something loses momentum.

Wrap Up

In conclusion, Symposium was excellent and reinforced what I believe is a strong vision—returning to a monolithic-like application that gives customers many capabilities in a single purchase. The challenge ahead is rebuilding all existing tools into Sitecore AI over the next year. They plan to launch new features rapidly over the coming months.

Starting Monday (11/10/2025), there will be many new launches that I'll explore and create content about shortly! They also announced next year's Symposium, returning to Orlando, FL on November 10–12.

As always, Symposium was a blast. It was a great opportunity to network and meet new faces on the Sitecore side, as well as connect with new MVPs and customers from the community.