Camp Opticon: What’s Worth Your Attention

Opticon is usually when Optimizely drops its biggest announcements of the year, and this one was no different. In addition to twelve main stage announcements and a conference that ran along three “trails,” we also previewed a new movie called "Murder in Marketing." It’s landing this Halloween, and was maybe the biggest surprise despite having nothing to do with the rest of this article. That came out of left field.

Blend has been an Optimizely partner for years and we often get a peek behind the curtain, so we usually walk into Opticon with a rough sketch of what’s coming. The announcements are typically about the platform itself: things like a new feature, or a rebuilt workflow — something we’ll need to learn before a client asks about it.

This year, it was a little different. It was almost entirely about restraint: what not to build, which model not to reach for, which tasks doesn’t require the expensive option.

If you’re running marketing or digital for your own company, here’s what’s worth knowing.

There’s a cheaper process for AI.

A lot of teams are running their tasks through the same expensive AI model, regardless of computing effort — everything from writing a press release to doing something that requires deeper reasoning. But not everything needs the most powerful model. 

Optimizely’s answer is model routing: which allows marketing teams to choose between Optimizely’s new, cheaper model for simple marketing, while a premium model is reserved for more difficult tasks. Opti is reporting close to ten times better cost efficiency for marketing tasks using their purpose-built model instead of more general models, with higher quality results.

Regardless of which platform you’re on, understanding the model matters. If your team can’t easily determine which tasks are running on which model (and why), there’s a good chance you’re overpaying for a lot of very ordinary work.

Virtual Teammates help automate common tasks.

Optimizely’s Opal is changing its name to Mark, but the name change matters less than the shift underneath it. Opal is introducing five “Virtual Teammates,” which replicate common roles: 

• Chief of Staff
• SEO & AI Search Analyst
• Marketing Analyst
• Personalization Strategist
• CRO Manager

Virtual Teammates don’t wait for a prompt; instead, they have their own inbox (and their own access), and they reach out to you proactively.

The value of Virtual Teammates is in how simple tasks are automated. Instead of the typical AI experience — in which you open a tab, you prompt it, and wait — Virtual Teammates are built to work like actual coworkers, with their own initiative.

I’m digging into this exact topic in more depth for Optimizely's Field Notes blog. Watch for that piece later this week.

The move to CMS 13 has gotten easier.

Finally, Optimizely announced Project Greenlight, a push to move customers worldwide onto CMS 13 using their own AI tooling to speed up the migration. If you’ve been putting off your Opti 13 upgrade to prevent months of disruption, this is a huge step toward making that upgrade a lot easier.

As a reminder, CMS 13 allows Opti sites to fulfill the promise of today’s web. It’s required to get real use out of Opti Graph, Visual Builder, and all of those newer agent capabilities we just talked about (hello, Mark!).

This tooling is very new — you’ll hear more from us once we’ve worked through our own upgrade using the Project Greenlight tooling.

So, what does this mean for your team?

There's a lot of Optimizely stuff to be excited about over the next year. Let's check in with the rest of the team to see what they're specifcially looking forward to.

First, a technical read, from Joe Kepley, Blend’s CTO: 

To date, the strengths of Optimizely AI efforts have been their tight integration into the Opti DXP suite. While these strengths would be good reasons to select Opti over other DXP products, you’d still likely be looking to more general purpose models like ChatGPT or Claude for other tasks.

With the new features announced this year, it feels like the solution is turning the corner, and giving you reasons to select Opti instead of tools like ChatGPT or Claude to act as the central automation solution for your marketing team. Tools like model routing address a CIO’s concerns of cost efficiency, and using marketing-specific rules could allow the solution to outperform vs a general LLM. The Virtual Teammates concept provides marketing teams with a faster time-to-value by creating proactive use cases that you can use right out of the box.

And now, a marketing read, from Taylor Lopour, Blend’s Director of Marketing: 

So much of marketing — communicating, planning, and operating — is tedious and time consuming busy work. So I am thrilled about Optimizely's Virtual Teammates. Now marketers like me can focus on strategy and creativity while a reliable resource helps drive results. Not to mention, the Teammates ability to share unprompted research and recommendations is game changing.

What’s next?

Optimizely is shipping about four new features a week right now, and they aren’t slowing down anytime soon. That’s a lot, even for an industry that prides itself on constant change. I get why it can feel like too much to track on top of everything else on your plate.

So, let’s partner up. Blend can help turn your crawl into a walk, so you can eventually run. Or, if you’d rather, let’s have Mark and your new Virtual Teammates run for you.