Upgrading to Optimizely CMS 13 brings AI content workflows, a new visual editor, and semantic search — here's why the move pays off quickly.
I spent my early years in the Carolinas, and one of the things that you learn at an early age in the South is that nothing is static. The warm summers and humid environment means that nature very quickly puts its mark on anything that’s left outside. Kudzu grows at an amazing rate. Anything metal quickly develops a patina, and then rust. Wood warps, rots, and sags. Without constant upkeep, structures like barns, sheds, and porches can degrade to become unusable in under a decade.
It seems ironic that in the very unnatural digital space, the same is still true. For enterprise software, shifts in underlying platforms, the security landscape, technical debt, and the way we work means that solutions require upkeep, and without it they’ll degrade over time.
For a lot of us, Optimizely CMS version 12 still feels like a recent release, but it first rolled out in 2021. I think the reason that the Opti 12 upgrade still looms large is due to the significant migration that was required to shift from the legacy .NET 4 platform to .NET Core. This brought major changes to the underlying language and libraries, but also set the solution up for better performance, cross-platform support, and a more flexible future.
The good news is that the move to Optimizely version 13 is a smaller undertaking. There are a number of changes coming to the platform that require some shifts, but they bring with them a number of advantages that will speed up your marketing and make the effort worthwhile.
Here are some reasons that we at Blend believe the upgrade to Opti 13 will deliver a rapid return on investment:
Optimizely CMS 13 fuels AI orchestration.
Opti 13 brings tight integration into Opal, Optimizely’s AI agent and orchestration platform, and with it a path to serious efficiency gains in your team’s content workflow. If you sit down and map out how your marketing content goes from idea to production to publication, you’ll undoubtedly find rote and manual tasks that could easily be automated.
For example, imagine a Word doc arrives in your editor’s inbox or marketing automation queue in Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP). Automation through Opti 13 allows you to set up a workflow where:
- AI extracts the content …
- performs editing passes for voice, tone, brand standards, SEO, and accessibility …
- adds summaries, keywords, and tags …
- puts a draft in your CMS …
- … and finally, lets your editor know over Teams that it’s ready for review.
This massively speeds up the production process and improves the quality of your content. And this is only automating the work you’re already doing. There are whole categories of improvements and optimization that probably aren’t on your radar due to time constraints.
Right now this type of AI enablement can be a competitive advantage for early adopters. We expect that within a few quarters this will become the norm; and before too long, teams with fully manual workflows will be at a disadvantage.
