I spent most Sitecore Symposium last week demoing, discussing, and tearing apart Sitecore's newest products - especially Sitecore Stream - for customers and partners.
The Point
Stream is Sitecore's new AI-focused platform for marketers - and it also demonstrates the velocity and quality of Sitecore's new R&D efforts. Even as an AI skeptic, I have to say: Stream shows some promise for AI-based marketing tools.
But first, what is Stream?
Stream is a singular product that provides three distinct features:
- Brand-aware AI: all AI features in stream start with a fundamental understanding of a company's brand.
- Marketer orchestration & Workflows: project and task management for marketing activities (this was the leading UI shown at Symposium).
- Copilots: AI-enabled helpers and tools peppered throughout Sitecore products; for example: SEO help, content optimization, data visualization, etc.
Keep in mind that Stream sits on top of Sitecore's other products - it's an add-on, essentially.
What do I think of Stream?
- Great first release: for unfinished software, Stream is very polished - and for a company known for buggy software releases, that's a major win; demoing Stream was super-easy when everything just worked.
- More than chatbots: AI Copilots show practical uses of generative AI throughout Sitecore products in small, easy to understand tools that attempt to address real marketer problems.
- UI and functional simplicity: the marketer workflow and orchestration pieces are simple to understand and obvious to use - and simple software is the best software.
- XP support is awesome: see, Sitecore isn't abandoning XP!
What are my concerns?
- What happens when the AI bubble pops? This is tough; while AI is here to stay, who supplies AI will change drastically over the next few years; is this a risk for AI-heavy products? In Sitecore's case, probably not (Sitecore is AI agnostic on the backend), but it's something on my mind.
- Workflow might not be enough for complex marketing teams: Stream's marketing & project orchestration is slick, simple, and easy to use - and might not be enough for more mature teams right now, although the product will evolve rapidly.
- Is it enough for the skpetics? Sitecore partners asked the hardest questions ("what about user trust?", etc.); folks need to see real problems being solved by AI before they will fully embrace it.
Overall, the Sitecore sales engineer in me is pretty excited about the potential of Stream (it demoes so well!). The jaded software developer in me is actually pretty excited that Stream shows potential for real, useful applications of AI beyond the usual chatbots.
And one more thing... that name: Sitecore Stream. What do you think?