What we learned at Opticon 2025 (Spoiler: it’s all about Opal)

Opticon 2025 lit up the Javits Center in New York City with one clear message: AI is the foundation of what’s next. Building on months of excitement around the platform, Optimizely placed Opal AI front and center, showing how it’s poised to elevate its leading DXP. 

Here are my top takeaways from the event and the business impacts every organization should be thinking about. 

Opal is everywhere 

What stood out this year was just how deeply integrated Opal has become. Whether the session was on CMS, CMP, or Experimentation, Opal was at the heart of the story. 

CMP has acted as a proving ground to demonstrate how Opal boosts productivity by automating tasks and commands within the chatbot. Now, many similar features are coming to CMS and Commerce, two products historically bogged down by repetitive, manual tasks and messy data. 

One key theme: SaaS products are getting Opal features first. While on-premise users might feel left behind, this staged rollout should ultimately make later releases more stable and reliable. 

Focus on inefficiency... Say what? 

This might feel backwards but stay with me. Many customers admitted they were still unsure where AI could make a tangible difference right now. Opticon sessions tackled that hesitation head-on with a simple lens: look for inefficiency. 

Repetitive, time-consuming tasks that don’t require deep critical thinking are prime candidates for AI automation. That message came to life during the keynote, where a demo showed Opal ingesting Figma designs and generating back-end CMS components in minutes, which reflects Horizontal's own design system expertise.

If the above example seems too good to be true, there is probably some truth to that. This capability doesn’t eliminate the need for developers (that would be a recipe for disaster), but it does eliminate wasted time. And as organizations identify these inefficiencies, they’ll uncover the first real opportunities for Opal to deliver measurable business value. 

But don't try to do too much at first. Just identifying where inefficiency exists and working to streamline the process sets us up for the final and biggest takeaway from Opticon 2025. 

The latest on Optimziely's agentic capabilities 

If you left Opticon without a perspective on agents, you missed one of the most important shifts of the conference. As someone who has gone to these conferences for over 15 years, I can’t remember another concept that could shake up the way we work quite as much as agents will.   

Agents—Opal’s specialized task performers (Opens in a new tab)—can handle audits, translations, content checks, or any input-output workflow. What’s powerful is that these agents aren’t limited to Optimizely products. They can run tasks across CRM, email, or other third-party platforms, unlocking cross-platform productivity. 

The real transformation comes when agents are paired with workflows: chaining different agents’ tasks together to automate complex processes at scale. Unlike your typical scheduled jobs or APIs, agent workflows are dynamic, adaptive, and capable of accelerating interconnectivity and flowing data in entirely new ways. 

What’s coming next 

Opticon 2025 will unsurprisingly be remembered as the year when all eyes were on AI.  Optimizely has gone all in on their agents by building a solid foundation that customers and partners will be working hard to take advantage of over the next year. It’s an exciting time with a lot of mysteries still left to unpack and room for customers to get creative with innovating and streamlining their business.