How much time does your marketing team spend on repetitive tasks that could be automated? Imagine if AI could free up that time by creating brand-aware content, letting your team focus on what matters most—creating impactful customer experiences.
Today, we’re exploring the future of Digital Experience Platforms and AI with Kathie Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore. We’re going to look at what an AI-Powered DXP is, and how it helps marketers achieve their goals and overcome some of their biggest challenges.
About Kathie Johnson
Kathie Johnson is the Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore, a leader in digital experience technology that spans content, commerce, and experience solutions. Before Sitecore, she played a transformative role at Talkdesk, where she led the marketing organization during a period of significant growth from #66 to #8 on the Forbes Cloud100 list. Prior to Talkdesk, Kathie served as Senior Vice President of Marketing at Salesforce, where she led a team overseeing 18 subverticals, helping to grow it into a multi-billion dollar business. She also held executive marketing roles in Demandware and Dassault Systemes earlier in her career.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
How much time does your marketing team spend on repetitive tasks that could be automated? Imagine if AI could free up that time by creating brand-aware content, letting your team focus on what matters most, creating impactful customer experiences. Today, we’re exploring the future of digital experience platforms and AI with Kathie Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore. We’re gonna look at what an AI-powered DXP is and how it helps marketers achieve their goals and overcome some of their biggest challenges. Kathy, welcome to the show.
Kathie Johnson: Greg, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, really looking forward to this conversation and to dive in here. But before we do, why don’t we start with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at Sikor.
Kathie Johnson: Sure. So actually, earlier this week, I just passed my one year mark at Sikor where I’m the chief marketing officer. So been here a year. Can’t believe how quickly it’s gone. Thank you. Prior to Sitecore, I was the CMO of TalkDesk in the contact center space. And prior to that, I was the SVP running marketing for all of the industries at Salesforce. And then I’m old, so lots of other things before that. But yes, been at Sitecore for a year. If folks don’t know Sitecore, Sitecore is in the digital experience space, been around for about 24 years. And what does that mean? We’re covering everything from content to experience, think websites, all the way to commerce. We were one of the companies who back in 2001 were really instrumental in building the CMS or content management system space. We were really the first to deliver composable to the market. And I like to say, I believe we’re first in delivering intelligent DXP or intelligent digital experience platforms to the to the market as well.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice. So yeah, let’s let’s dive in right there. And first thing I want to just from a definition standpoint, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, what exactly is an AI powered or an intelligence powered DXP? So why don’t we do that by starting to talk a little bit about the challenges that marketers face. And one of those is certainly, there’s lots of talk, we’ve been talking about personalization, I feel like for like ever. it’s becoming more and more real, right? But you know, creating hyper personalized, high impact digital experiences while staying within budget, right? Because those are not not always not always the same thing. So, you know, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that stand in the way of, of, you know, what what marketers really need to do to realize this, some of these things?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, for sure. Greg, what I’d really like to start with is what are the three main pain points that marketers are facing today? As a CMO, I’m experiencing these. I hear them from every CMO I talk to. The first is really do more with less. You referenced the budget piece. The second is managing through complexity. I’ll talk about that. And the third is around balancing that strategic or long-term with the tactical or short-term. So if you think about doing more with less, like every marketing team is asked to make a bigger impact, right, with their customers, with the growth of the business while lowering costs. And every marketer is asked to show ROI for everything that they do. So it’s interesting, like in a recent CMO council survey, marketing executives reported that improving ROI and demonstrating attribution are the most important improvements that need to be made. The second is banishing through complexity. So every marketing team is challenged with ensuring that everything created by a marketer and all of their agencies stays true to the brand, right? You think of small organizations or large organizations, you know, marketing is complex. Lots of individuals have unique roles. It’s a team sport and we have multiple agencies that we work with. And then the third is balancing that strategic or long-term with the tactical. And you talked about this a little bit in your intro, right, how the world is changing for marketers today. Marketers are so focused on managing this complexity of the day-to-day, so they have less time for strategy. But how do you free up this time for marketers so that they can focus on the strategic? There’s complexity in the Martet stack. There’s complexity in market changes, right? all these layers of complexity for marketers. So one of the things we looked at, Greg, is, you know, we did a survey back in, I think it was in September time period, and we surveyed marketers across the US, UK, and Australia, and we really wanted to understand, and we know about these pain points we just talked about, we know the importance of digital experience and hyper-personalization that you just mentioned. what’s really happening to these marketers. And what they said in this survey was that 80% told us that creating that great DX, that great digital experience that comes with hyper-personalization and everything, really requires a blend of strategy, technology, content, intelligence, and optimization. But only 27% of them feel that they can do it today, right? So again, going back to those pain points, but then also looking at why, why is that so difficult? Part of it is our tech systems, legacy technology. Part of it is data governance issues, right? Part of it is a lot of organizations have disparate Martech systems. So when you have these disparate systems, going back to what you were asking, it’s really difficult to create cohesive digital experiences for your customers at every touch point.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so I think that that leads us to that what exactly is this AI powered or this intelligent DXP that can solve some of these challenges. And so, you know, Sitecore Stream recently announced it at Sitecore Symposium. Probably a lot of you saw that or heard that announcement or a little bit ago. It sounds like, you know, that’s a major step towards this intelligent DXP concept. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, based on some of the challenges that you just described, you know, how do you define an intelligent DXP? And, you know, how does something like Sitecore Stream contribute to that goal?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, thanks so much for that question. I bet, Greg, there are some people who don’t know what DXP or digital experience platform is. So if that’s okay with you, let me start there. And then I’ll talk about the intelligent DXP. So a DXP is really an integrated set of core technologies that support the creation, the management, the delivery, and the optimization of digital experiences and yes that’s websites but it’s not just websites you know are united we have united as a customer of ours and they use it in digital signage right so can be any digital experience brought forward and so when you think about the products or functionality that creator or part of a DXP, you’ve got a digital asset management system, you have a content marketing platform, you have a content management system, think websites, you have personalization, think about the hyper-personalization and that importance, the importance there, and then you have search and discovery. And all of those pieces make up a digital experience platform. So again, think about going back to the comment I made earlier about systems being disparate and how tough that makes it for marketers to create exceptional experiences. When you bring all of these together, you can really have magic happen. So that’s a DXP. So then we, I believe, at Sitecore, we coined the phrase intelligent DXP. That was really our vision of how do we bring generative AI into a DXP to really make it easier for marketers. and develop Sitecore Stream on that. So Intelligent DXP is really taking your DXP, putting Gen AI embedded in it so you’re not just tacking it on. And that was the vision that we had. And then what we launched at Symposium was Sitecore Stream, as I mentioned. And Sitecore Stream, Greg, is, oh, as a marketer, I just got so excited when I got to launch it at Symposium because It was developed with marketers for marketers, which is just when I think amazing technology comes to be when you’re building it directly with your target audience to use it. We created it with Microsoft, we created it with Nestle, and Oud Gondon, who is the global CMO of Nestle, actually did a video talking about how she was using Sitecore Stream, which is just so exciting. We built it with customers like Nestlé and others. We built it with my team and other CMOs, B2B and B2C, and really want to look at what are all those workflows that are required for marketers so that you know, marketers would start their day in CENCOR, right? As you think about how do you manage through all these pain points that we have, how do you manage to what you’re trying to accomplish, that hyper-personalization, those exceptional digital experiences for your customers, and how do you do it in a way that makes marketing really shine?
Greg Kihlstrom: You know, I think a lot of the focus, and rightfully so, is what that end customer is experiencing and that journey that the customer is having. But any of us that has worked on the marketing side knows there’s a lot that goes into creating those experiences. And we’re talking omni-channel now, and testing, all of those kinds of things. I want to talk a little bit more about the workflow of this. And so, you know, one of the features that you refer to of Sidecar Stream is AI enhanced workflows. So automating repetitive tasks, stuff like that. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe share some examples of, you know, what does this mean as far as automated workflows and how can this enhance some of that productivity and collaboration?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, for sure. And Greg, I think one thing that’s super interesting, I know all marketers love data, so I just want to share some data from a recent survey result, which shows why this is so important. But, you know, we did another survey we did with Microsoft and Avanade, we just launched it this week, and it was all around AI and marketing workflows. And 74% of companies are using AI in marketing, but only 12% are prepared to do it at scale. And then add on to that, that 86% of the companies using AI do not use a standardized AI tool set today, right? And when you think about it, think of the thousands of MarTech tools out there. And I read recently that I think 77% of new tools that are being created and launched today have AI in them. I believe it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so just think of that complexity, right? So what we really wanted to do was you look at your core set of content and experience, which is so much of what a marketer brings to market, how do we offer a solution that is an add-on to that across everything you do? So think about simplifying the complexity, think about getting rid of disparate systems, right, which is a pain point for marketers. So you mentioned it earlier too, marketing’s a team sport, right? And there are all these specialized roles in marketing and to bring positive, effective, efficient experiences to market requires this beautiful and seamless orchestration across marketers with lots of collaboration. And so the workflows are really intended to help us with that, right? The Sitecore stream has three main pieces. That is brand-aware AI, it has AI-enhanced workflows, and it has co-pilots to make it easier, okay? The AI-enhanced workflows really support marketing teams from the very beginning by helping create clearer, more effective campaign briefs. Ask any marketer out there how much it costs when you have a bad brief, whether it’s lost time to deliver to market, whether it’s actually the cost of having the agency redo the work for you, right? Like effective campaign briefs are so critical when you think of time and you think of cost, and actually you also think about consistency in market and what you’re trying to accomplish. So Sitecore Stream brings all of these collaborators together, so think about your internal teams, think about all of your agencies out there, into a unified orchestration layer. And that minimizes the time lost in handoffs, it minimizes the cuts down and the delays that happen in review cycles. So it really just manages that whole workflow for you.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And so you, you touched on this a little bit, but I want, I want to get to the, you mentioned kind of the siloed usage of, you know, every, everybody may have their go-to like AI tool or whatever that they, that they lean on. And, you know, I think in a sense that’s, that’s helping productivity in the sense of, getting things done quicker, but it’s not really promoting brand consistency or really the law, the long game, which is people working better collaboratively together and all that kind of stuff. So can you talk a little bit about what does it look like when that kind of stuff is more centralized and everybody’s using a common platform?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, well, let’s talk about the brand piece. And this is really where Nestle leveraged the work with Microsoft to leverage the work with Sitecore. And one of the statements that Aug and Don stated in this video she created, which is available on our website and YouTube, is that she really sees this as the future of content operations. And I’ll explain why. So again, think of that complexity of all of these marketers. Think about the complexity of working with all these agencies. How do you ensure that your brand is consistent in market? Because branding consistency helps build trust. And trust helps build engagement, right? So it’s so important that we manage that really well. And it’s really the marketing team that is overseeing that mostly. So it’s really important that we get that right. So part of Sitecore Stream is a piece that we call, you know, brand aware AI. And that’s all about being grounded with an organization’s unique brand architecture through brand kits. Okay, so you have these brand kits, they’re using the customer’s brand assets, the guidelines and the key documents, and they’re being uploaded into Sitecore Stream. So they can really understand, so Sitecore Stream can understand and respect the nuances of a brand’s identity, the brand’s tone, the visual style, so that everything that the AI is suggesting really aligns with the brand values. Because again, we need to be consistent so we can build trust, so we can build engagement and market. So, that’s one of the things that’s just really important, and that’s what, as I mentioned, Nestle has done. They call it their brand assistant, where they’ve taken the ingestion of all of the AI, they’re sharing it across all of their agencies, and there are thousands of marketers in countries all over the world. And one of the things I like to sort of share is that it’s not just the ingestion piece, but think about this for a moment, because marketers pivot all the time. So what if something happens in market and you make a change, right, to your brand, to your brief? How do you ensure that every marketer around the world, every agency around the world is, you know, using the latest for consistency? And so when you’re ingesting this onto the brand-aware AI and into a you know, capability called Sitecore Stream that’s an add-on to all of your content, all of your experience, then all of a sudden you’ve got one integrated solution that is ensuring that every marketer everywhere in the world is being consistent to the brand based on the latest information.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s great. Yeah, that that consistency means can mean a lot. And the speed to that is, that’s very compelling. Another thing, just kind of talking about alignment in general, and you know, certainly there’s some concerns and around AI and data privacy. Can you talk a little bit about that? You know, how does how does the design of Sitecore Stream address some of these challenges and what guardrails are in place to protect brand compliance and customer data and things like that.
Kathie Johnson: Greg, that is so important. And one of the things in this recent survey that we did that I mentioned with Microsoft Denominator that just launched this week is that we asked what are marketers most concerned about? And 61% of them are concerned about data privacy and security. I also recently held a CMO dinner where many of the CMOs were on the table, variety of industries, variety of company sizes. had that as a major concern as well, right? Their companies are concerned, they’re concerned, et cetera. And so, first and foremost, you know, Sitecore, we do not use our customer data to train the underlying AI models. And I would just give this advice to every marketer when they’re evaluating any AI technology out there. Again, 77% of the new technology has AI. Like, that needs to be a question you ask. Will my company confidential, my IP, my customer data be used to train any AI models or not? And we are not using that. We definitely have those very strong guardrails. We’re built on Microsoft that has those strong guardrails as well. So your data will never be used to train our models. And that’s really, really important. And then in addition, there’s the secondary guardrail around brand because a lot of companies think about, especially regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, right? It’s so important that your language be, I’ll use the word perfect. Because you have all of these regulatory issues and constraints, you have to stay within it. By using these brand kits, it also ensures that you’re staying true to what you need to say and avoiding what you can’t say in all of your materials across all of your marketers and all of your agencies. There’s the overall, you know, we’re not using your data to train the AI models. And the brand kits that you can use within Sitecore Stream also help ensure, in every industry, most importantly in regulated where they have a lot of restrictions, you’re staying with it, being true to language that you can and avoid in a language you can’t use. And I think those two pieces really can give comfort to marketers around the data privacy and brand compliance rules.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great, that’s a great usage of, you know, there’s concerns that, you know, AI may open up things, but that’s a, that’s a usage of technology to actually close some of that loop, those loops. Right. So that’s, that’s really, that’s really, that’s really important. I want to talk a little bit more about the generative AI components as well. And you had mentioned co-pilots and wanted to dive in a little bit more on that. So, you know, Sitecore Stream uses some co-pilots for many tasks, it sounds like. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how they support marketers in doing their work?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, just going back to the framing again, Sitecore Stream has three core elements. We’ve talked about the brand-aware AI, we’ve talked about the workflows, and now we’re going to talk about the co-pilots, so really almost that agent that you get to work with all across the process. Every co-pilot is grounded in the customer’s unique brand guidelines, we just talked about that a moment ago, and all of your assets. And then we have co-pilots along the way. So think about a content co-pilot, a campaign co-pilot, an experience co-pilot. So a content co-pilot really ensures that the drafts that you’re creating reflect the brand’s tone. And the experience co-pilot recommends web page layouts that align with the brand standards. And the campaign co-pilots suggest personalized elements. Again, going back to what you mentioned at the beginning, hyper-personalization is so important. So these pilots are really helping you, you know, determine what you should do, what you can do, and actually also making recommendations of how to make things better when you think about personalization. So again, those co-pilots are all around brand, content, campaign, and experience.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Could you maybe give an example of what’s an example of this in action?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, sure. So let’s talk about Let’s imagine there’s a customer that’s launching a new product campaign, okay? So they start by uploading their campaign brief and brand assets into Sitecore Streams. So again, thinking about feeding in, you know, that brand kit piece, but also your campaign brief. So the content co-pilot would quickly then generate a brand-aligned social media post, blog snippets, email drafts, ensuring that every single piece of snackable content and every piece of overall content reflects the brand’s tone, reflects the brand’s messaging. But at the same time, then the experience co-pilot is recommending what’s the best web page layouts for the campaign landing page. Again, adhering to the design standards that have been ingested into the tool or into the functionality. And then as the team sets up the landing page, the campaign co-pilot suggests personalizing the hero. right, to show different visuals or messages for specific audience segments. Thinking a different industry, how should they receive the communication visually and in content form? And everything then is managed within Sitecore Stream. The customer can execute the campaign faster. Think about full brand consistency always. Think about achieving a seamless and effective launch across channels. And we mentioned this, I mentioned this just a moment ago, a bit about Nestle. They piloted and are now using generative AI. with their brand guidelines and their toolkits, and they’re using what they call the brand assistant to facilitate that brand and category knowledge within their organization and with all of their agencies around the world. So think about it as your helper, right? Sort of pointing you in the right direction when you think about orchestration, but also giving you suggestions for improvement based on past performance and knowledge.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s, that’s great. That’s, I think that really paints the picture of, you know, just how, like the breadth of, of ways that this can help and just, you know, throughout the process. And I think a lot of, yeah, I think there’s a lot of, you know, immediate benefits here. I wonder, you know, if you could take us maybe a few months, years down the road and talk a little bit about the future of AI and DXPs and, you know, how do you envision AI continuing to shape this, you know, the landscape of DXPs and what advice would you have to marketers that want to stay ahead here?
Kathie Johnson: It’s such a great question. This is definitely a really interesting time for sure. And Greg, I see it really in two ways, like how do companies, what’s going to happen from a company perspective and what’s going to happen from a marketer perspective? From a marketing perspective, I hope every marketer is embracing AI. I mean, this is one of the questions I ask whenever I host a CMO event. Like, are you using AI? Are you using it daily? Are you learning from it? I often tell my team, Greg, that if we’re doing the same marketing today that we did yesterday, then we’re already behind. And Gen AI makes this more true than ever before. There is an adage out there which I’m sure you’ve heard that AI won’t replace marketers, but marketers who know AI will. So I think the first thing I just want to say as a marketer, like marketers always need to test and learn anyway. Every marketer should be using Gen AI every day and learning from it so that they’re staying on top of it. So I just wanted to level set that. I think that’s really uber important. It’s not something you outsource to your team. Everyone needs to do it. And then from a company perspective, I believe that the companies who embrace AI technology embedded in the technology they trust, again thinking about the privacy, data privacy that we just spoke about a minute ago, those companies will be the ones that win. They’ll win in productivity, they’ll win in efficiency, they’ll win in freeing up their teams to have more time for strategic thinking so that they can out beat the competition. And I really believe that eventually it’ll be the companies who don’t embrace the new technology who will be left behind. And Greg, I’m old enough, this is embarrassing maybe, but I’m old enough that I was in marketing when the internet became a thing. Imagine that. And the company I was at had been around for 30 years and I had gone to whomever in the organization and it was like, I want us to build a website. This is the new thing. We need to build a website. And nobody wanted to do it. They were afraid of it. They were afraid of compliance. They were afraid of privacy. They were afraid. what it would mean, and some people even said to me, it’s not gonna be a thing, it’s a fad, right? And so the CIO or the head of IT at the time and I just locked arms and we just built that first website. So you think about all these years later, could you imagine a company being successful today without a website?
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right, I know.
Kathie Johnson: And so I think that analogy is really important because I feel like the conversation, the dialogue on Gen AI today is very similar to the conversation and dialogue I heard on the internet all those years ago. Like the unknown can be scary. but we have to embrace it. Otherwise, we will be left behind as a company. Then, from a Sitecore-specific perspective, you’ll really see us continue to add AI-driven functionality to our DXP. I already mentioned that tools today, technology today, is all coming out with AI in it. At the same time, data privacy and security is so important. We want to ensure that our customers have the opportunity to really benefit from Gen AI in a technology like Sitecore Stream on Sitecore that they can trust, that helps a marketer do their best work, that becomes that place where a marketer can start their day. can have those co-pilot assistants making all along that journey of orchestration with a brand-aware AI and the AI-embedded workflows.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, yeah, and I definitely share your sentiment about the parallels between early days of the internet. I do, I remember those days when it was, it wasn’t a question of like, what should we do with our website? But should we have one? So I, I do feel like we’re at another moment, like there’s been plenty of buzzwords and, you know, mark, we marketers love our buzzwords and acronyms and all those things. But there’s been plenty of those. But this does seem like one of those moments where, you know, there’s real practical benefits. And there’s real, you know, I think there’s going to be a growth in the divide of leaders and laggards, you know, over the months to come, not even just years. So Definitely agree with your sentiments there. Well, Kathy, thanks so much for joining today. This has been great talking with you. I’ve got one last question for you. I like to ask everybody on the show. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Kathie Johnson: Yeah, I love that question. I think it’s really about being curious, right? We spoke about that a little while ago. Marketers need to always read and know what the latest things are that are coming out, right? I have a joke that – well, it’s not a joke. It’s a true fact that I knew about TikTok before my teenage children. I introduced them to it. Now they use it way more than I do, but it’s so important as marketers that we’re always reading and looking for trends and things happening in markets. So being curious, asking questions, listening to podcasts. I love listening to podcasts and reading. I walk my dogs every day. That’s my podcast listening time. I read every night before going to sleep. Those are really how I carve out those two moments in a day that are so important, as well as there’s always the joke I would say that finding the minutes between the seconds. And when you can find those minutes between the seconds, catching up on something, reading something out there is important. And CMO networks is the last thing I’ll say. I just love working with, conversing with, learning from other CMOs, and CMO networks are just a fabulous way to ask questions, get some learning, and just test things out.
