Marketers’ roles are changing, but their goals are still the same: reach and engage customers, meeting them where they are, and for better or worse, often needing to do more with less while delivering greater value.
Agility requires both adapting to change quickly while also having the wisdom to know which changes truly matter. It demands a delicate balance between embracing new technologies and staying laser-focused on core business objectives.
Today, we are here in New York City at Opticon25. We are going to talk about the growing role of AI for both marketers and consumers, how organizations can leverage an agentic platform to create better internal and external customer experiences, and how marketers can both do more with less while delivering exponentially greater value. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer and Kevin Li, SVP Product at Optimizely.
About Rupali Jain
Rupali Jain is the Chief Product Officer at Optimizely. Previously she has held product leadership roles at several SaaS software companies, including Microsoft’s PowerBI and Qualtrics. Throughout her two-decade career, Rupali has shared Optimizely’s vision of prioritizing the end user’s daily needs. Rupali is committed to advancing practical, growth-driving applications of AI and machine learning to help marketers take control of their workflows, experiment at scale, and deliver digital experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations.
Rupali Jain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupali/
About Kevin Li
At Optimizely (previously Episerver before rebrand), I describe my job as a “tale of two mirrors” with one being a telescope and one being a microscope. On the telescope side of product strategy, I own long-term strategy covering build/buy/partner, M&A (thesis, due diligence, etc.), new product launches (SaaS CMS, Personalization, etc.), analyst relations (leader in 11 categories across Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), etc. On the microscope side of product operations, I own the product commercialization process, product operations, product analytics, documentation, and competitive intelligence.
Kevin Li on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsyli/
Resources
Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
Marketers roles are changing, but their goals are still the same. Reach and engage customers, meeting them where they are, and for better or worse, often needing to do more with less while delivering greater value. Agility requires both adapting to change quickly while also having the wisdom to know which changes truly matter. It demands a delicate balance between embracing new technologies and staying laser focused on core business objectives. Today we are here in New York City at Opticon 25.
We are here to talk about the growing role of AI for both marketers and consumers and how marketers can do more with less while delivering exponentially greater value. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer and Kevin Li SVP Product at Optimize.ly. Rupali and Kevin, welcome back to the show.
Rupali Jain (00:48)
Thanks for having us, Greg. Yeah, good to talk to you.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:51)
Yeah, I think you’re both at least on episode two here at the show So glad to be talking with both of you have to have the brain trust in the room here. So love that so let’s let’s get started with Just there are plenty of announcements this morning here at Opticon So let’s start with some of the big news here. One of those was Around a gentic AI which is you know, lots of talk about that Increasingly showing promise in a number of areas of marketing
So ⁓ why don’t we start by talking about some of the out of the box agents that Optimizely announced.
Rupali Jain (01:25)
So what we really announced was the Agent Orchestration Platform for Marketing. And that has two lenses to it. So it has the out-of-the-box agents that you’re referring to, and there’s also a platform component, which is super, super important as part of this announce. So on the out-of-the-box agents that we talked about for CMS, we announced what we’re doing with the creation of a page and the creation of a site, and not just the facade of one that you can get from any of these prototyping solutions that exist but a fully formed enterprise ready website, which includes your content model. It includes all of the components that you create. All of that’s available. And then it’s optimized for GEO through another agent. And then you can get the analytics on it. So that was the big announcement, the CMS out of the box. On the experimentation out of the box, we have five agents that basically automate your program end to end and take the cost down to setting experiment pretty much down to zero and really allow users to focus on velocity and outcomes.
And so we have agents all the way from ideation to setup to what I call the don’t run dumb experiments. We probably have a more formal answer for what that thing is called and also create it live without developers and then summarize. And so basically the entire life cycle and the platforms where it gets really interesting because what we want is a true ecosystem in the market where marketers have all of the tools and the capabilities they need in one place. So we announced an agent directory where you can find all of the agents that exist. We have out of the box agents, customers can build their own agents, don’t need to write any code. We also have the ability to sequence these agents and tools as workflows and an open ecosystem for workflows. So you can take action. Like to me as a product leader, so important to take action, because that’s where the magic is. It’s not just a, hey, I chatted, I know what to do. It’s the, now let’s please get it done. That’s 80 % of the work.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:19)
Yeah, and mean, seeing it in action from, ⁓ you know, the stuff on stage, it was, you know, I think a lot of people are used to, like, they go to chat GPT or Claude or something like that, copy paste back and forth, and it’s like, yes, it’s very cool to be able to do that, but it’s also disruptive and inconsistent and all those things. So to be able to see it, like, in action and somebody literally chatting with their webpage to, hey, do this different or make this thing, like that’s a pretty cool development that’s all there.
Rupali Jain (03:50)
And that’s the point. You want it all there in the moment because to your point, I’ve gotten distracted every time I go to chat with you. I’m like, wait, what was I doing?
Greg Kihlstrom (03:57)
Right. So, Rupali, you mentioned a bit about building that underlying platform. Kevin, maybe talk a little bit more about what that means and what that means for both partners as well as customers.
Kevin Li (04:12)
Yeah, for us, the platform is super important. mean, I would have think, you know, back maybe a year or two when everyone in this space is purely building sort of embedded AI, sort of AI features. I think a lot of our competitors are still sort of going down that path. To us, it was a deliberate strategic decision to build Opal as a platform in and of itself. And this is important because like at the end of the day, I think there’s a couple of sort of context elements driving this. So at customers, for example, they can’t start from a blank slate. So they need AI to plug in into their existing systems. So without having a platform to do that, without having the tools and the openness of the overall platform, that’s going to be really hard and that’s going to fundamentally hinder AI adoption. The second thing is really, there’s so much like at the end of the day, yes, we’re a CMS. Yes, we have experimentation. Yes, we have CDP. Yes, we can do collaboration, et cetera, but no customer runs their entire stack on Optimizely. So they need, you know, they might have analytics on Google Analytics. They all have Salesforce. Like it’s different categories altogether. So
Without a platform, it’s also very hard to do a Gentic orchestration across entire workflows. Right. So, so that’s the thinking sort of behind that. Like, could it happen faster, cheaper, easier for us just to do, you know, CMS specific use cases? 100%. I think we’re probably never like, we could have taken the easy way out with this. We just said like, Hey, you get this thing in CMS, get this thing experimentation. You know, we, we, we, we high five each other and call it a day, but
That’s not what customers actually want. They want to orchestrate things to say, how do I grab a thing from GA4? How do I look at a thing from Salesforce? How do I take those things and actually then build a much better experience? Like you can only do that with a platform. So for us, that’s a key, key, key strategic decision. And I think it’ll pay off dividends. have partners who are very excited about the openness of this. That was the number one question that we got is this. I want to bring my own agents how to do that. You can do that with a platform. Like, oh, I want to bring in extra.
I want to connect optimally to Zendesk, things that we don’t think about. How do you do that? It’s like, you can do that within a platform. So the flexibility and the openness of it is what’s driving it. And we’re getting very good feedback from customers and partners about this.
Rupali Jain (06:23)
mean, the market tech landscape isn’t shrinking anytime soon, So our customers have a bunch of tools. And so to Kevin’s point, an ecosystem is the only path forward.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:33)
Yeah, well, and the flexibility plus the speed too, right? It’s, you know, because I mean, I’ve been involved in API connections and all the, you all those things that can take, you know, weeks, months, all those things to do. And now we’re talking about a platform that pretty, pretty quick, right? To be able to do some of this stuff. Yeah.
So ⁓ let’s talk about this from the marketer’s role. How does all of this, I mean, very cool stuff to be able to integrate and do things a lot more quickly. How does this change the role of marketing over the coming months and years? And even based on how I know Optimizely uses your own tools to do this stuff. you’ve got some firsthand knowledge as well. So what does this look like for marketers in the months to come?
Kevin Li (07:23)
Yeah, I want to piggyback off of the point you just made, Greg, which is the one around sort of like integrations. to Rupai’s point, we’re not, marketers aren’t going to be dealing with one or two tools in their foreseeable future, right? They all have dozens, hundreds, whatever they’re dealing with. So this integration piece of it is actually a really important point, which is like marketers can now actually use Opal as a very powerful integration layer to get workflow done, but not actually be dependent on development resources to do that. we’re sort of seeing this, know, LMS are great for chatting and whatnot. Everyone’s like, yeah, obviously using it for that. like the shift from fine grained API spec’d out integrations to stand up marketing workflow use cases, we’re now moving to just like, can you just talk, like, tight out what your intent is and the workflow actually gets done. So I think the biggest thing is, is marketers shifting their thinking for how work gets done is probably the most important point. And I think we’re still in the early stages where a lot of folks in the market still don’t quite understand that that’s the big unlock here of how do we get use cases done without getting bogged down. And I think we were talking about this yesterday. Everyone’s seen the 78-page API spec doc to do one use case that takes three months to do. How do we get out of that type of a hamster wheel and actually get more done. I think that’s that kind of the key thing. So the marketers is sort of changing from a execution spec writing type of a role to just like, if you can describe your intent of what you’re doing, just let the software do it for you. Right. So that’s where we want to meet the marketers.
Rupali Jain (09:06)
I think to pick up on that last point about intent, to me it’s a very marked shift from marketers need to think about the strategy and the outcomes that they’re trying to drive for the business at the end of the day, right? I use the term that agents, AI is giving you the ability to move fast. What is the ability to move fast? It’s literally agility. And then if you move fast and everyone’s moving fast, but you’re going in different directions, that is pure and utter chaos. Now, what that translates into in organizations and for marketers, especially in our worldview, is that marketers need to get really clear on what their strategy is and really align execution. Because now you can trust the execution. It’s no longer a crutch of the, I’m focused on execution, so I no longer need to know the strategy. Because execution will happen. If you don’t have a strategy, the execution will not deliver the things you want. And so to me, it’s so, so important to define the key goals that you’re trying to achieve and validate those as a hypothesis, bring testing early into the game and really align. And this is not just an agent piece. This is aligning people and agents. Like that part’s going to come into play. But the strategic focus is non-negotiable. Like AI can’t do that for you. AI is not creative. AI is not going to think for you. Like yes, it can reason. It can help you be that sounding board. But you’ve got to keep control of the car.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:28)
Yeah, I I agree there. think a lot of the focus is on efficiency and for good reason, because, mean, man, it can do things very quickly and very well very quickly. But to your point about strategy, I mean, what would your advice be to keep that in mind? know, because I think it’s a really important point and the moving quickly ⁓ and whether it’s parallel or disparate paths, it could be chaos.
So, you know, how do you kind of keep that strategy in mind?
Kevin Li (11:01)
Yeah, I think one thing to keep in mind about AI systems in general is still it’s just like any technology, I garbage in, garbage out. It like still is the case. context is still super, super important. That’s one thing we spend a lot of time thinking about in terms of organization-wide, enterprise-wide context. One thing, how do we do retrieval augmented generation in the right way for enterprises? How do we think about use case specific context? You know, I sort of have this example, if you’re familiar with sort of the Wendy’s social media account that’s a different context that we’re putting in there than overall Wendy’s global brand. And how do we think about also user specific context as well? So that’s the big thing. ⁓ If we get the context right, the output becomes better. And if the output becomes better, it’s no longer just this efficiency thing or moving faster in the wrong direction side of it. I think there’s another piece of this, is with AI, and I’ve been using maybe the iceberg metaphor that like marketers, they only have time to optimize the visible stuff in an iceberg. And so much of the things that’s actually valuable, but not getting done today is, you below the waterline, right? Like they’re, don’t get to it because they don’t have time, not because it’s not valuable. Like, should you be updating your pages every single week or every single month to remain fresh and rank well for AEO, GEO and SEO, cetera? Like you should absolutely do that. Should you do competitive research for every single brief to increase the quality of your campaigns? You should absolutely do that.
Right. But, but no one’s thought about it before that it’s, it’s, they’re like, yeah, I should, but I would never have the resources and budget to do that. I think that’s the other piece, which is how is it not just about efficiency of existing things that you can see today? So the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, but also really get at how do you fundamentally change the way that you operate as marketing and doing the things that you literally honestly is like, well, I didn’t think that was possible. Um, how do I actually start getting that done?
Greg Kihlstrom (12:55)
Absolutely. some of that may also play into just how consumers, mean, consumers are always changing. We could say that at any point in time, but consumers are using AI as well. And that’s also affecting how marketers are approaching anything from, SEO was dominating the way that a lot of website owners really thought about their websites. And now we’ve got lots of names for it, but we’ve got GEO that is, you know, people are finding content, interacting with content even in very different ways through perplexity, chat GPT and so on and so forth. How should marketers be looking at this? And so what’s Optimizely’s approach to to GEO?
Rupali Jain (13:42)
I think before I get into Optimizely’s approach to GEO, you were starting to get at, should marketers think about it? I think it’s a little bit of like, go down to the fundamentals. Because what you’re trying to do as a marketer is you’re creating brand differentiation and content as we’re surviving a lot of the behaviors. And these engines, whether you call them answer engines, GEO, SEO, perplexity, what have you, all of us are using them. So we know exactly what it feels like. This is not a, hey, something’s happening to us far off in the distance. We know this up close and personal.
And so get familiar with what’s happening, right? At the end of the day, if you get down to the fundamentals, it comes down to like your content is still at the heart of everything you’re trying to achieve. so creating that content, differentiating that content is super important. Now, what it means is that you now have a new audience because remember users are now going to these AI engines or to AI to basically answer the questions. And so you’re losing that user directly and you have a machine in the middle. And you also have users coming to your website. So you have that dichotomy of machines and users, and you’re optimizing for both. If you squint hard enough, that looks like cohorts to me. Just slightly different behaviors. But I think, ⁓ aside and all of that aside, machines can read structured data. So you’re starting to get into a world where your content starts to look like structured data, so you can feed it into the machine. And so the machine can do a good job in answering the question for you and representing you well.
And you need to treat this as an opportunity because as I talked to some customers that have done a really good job of structuring their data, in the past they did it for search engines, but they’re showing up with these answer engines really well and they’re seeing really good bottom of the funnel conversions. And so the people that are coming to your website are coming with good intent. You know that they’re coming with intent and so you can convert them. And so it’s a shift in how you think, but again, the foundations don’t go away. It’s not a let’s toss everything we know and let’s start from scratch, right? The customers that are doing well with GEO are the ones that are starting with what they have as strength and SEO and building upon that with whether it’s Q &A style answers, how do you educate the machine? And optimise leave, we’re just building all of this seamlessly into the CMS. You create a webpage, we structure the content for you. We understand exactly what it looks like so we can feed it to the machines.
We can also create the Q &As for you. We create the machine readable text files that tell the machine how to translate and how to read the pages. And plus we give you analytics on the visibility or will shortly. And so that’s the end to end for what’s happening. think fundamentals matter and bottom of the funnel really comes into play.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:28)
Yeah, yeah. mean, it sounds like it’s always going to come down to good content is going to drive that good experience. Details are going to evolve over time or whatever, but good content is still good.
Kevin Li (16:43)
Yeah. And I think just to add to that, think we’re still, it’s also important to keep in mind, we’re still in the super early stages of AEO, GEO to the point where no one can agree on what this thing is actually called. let’s just keep that in mind. If you were just tossing out, is it an answer engine, is it a gender of answer, is it AEO, GEO, AIO? Right. So that’s the key thing to keep in mind. It still reminds me of like, you know, back in the early days of like SEO, people were like putting
Greg Kihlstrom (16:54)
We’re the acronym kind of.
Kevin Li (17:09)
white links on white backgrounds to try to like their rankings on Google search back in the day. think we’re still in that, and fundamentally the thing that really companies are looking at, it’s like, you know, we’re making moves to help customers really understand what that is, and we’ll keep on innovating on features, but we’re still, like as an industry, we’re still very early in this. You know, fundamentally, what do the LLM vendors decide to do is one of those things. Like, are we going to have the equivalent of search console data for LLMs? Maybe, maybe not. It’s one of those things where I think the market itself and the players are rapidly shifting. And obviously we’re keeping pace and really leading in terms of how brands should really think about it. But it’s important to just keep in mind that like this is, know, baseball analogy wise, like we’re at the bottom of the first inning, right? People just got their seats and they’re still on their, like they just opened up the bag of peanuts. Like that’s where we are right now.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:13)
Yeah, well, and to that point, too, I feel like a year from now, we’re probably going to be, lots will have changed as it always does. But mainstream usage of AI by consumers, again, they’re using chat GPT and stuff like that. But we have had announcements from PayPal and MasterCard to have consumer buying agents and things like that. how do you, should marketer, how close attention should marketers be paying to this and how does having like an agentic platform ⁓ set a marketer up for these changes to come?
Kevin Li (18:50)
So I think that almost back to Rapalai’s point, it goes back to first principles. Like at the end of the day, you know, it’s always been about buying and selling. It’s a basics of trade. Right. So you could have a buying agent on behalf of a consumer. Then what is that on the other side in terms of brand? It’s a brand selling agent, which is really just like, well, that’s a website. That’s literally right. the website is today a one too many, and then we do personalization, we do a one to a few, et cetera, et cetera. So like the next evolution of this is just, it’s still a brand selling agent, but I think the details is then how is this going to play out sort of technologically. So for example, is there a future where maybe, maybe chat GPT opens up an ability for brands to list or own brand agents inside of chat GPT, in which case great, like optimize it would love to be in that position to help our customers, right? Get surface and found and so on and so forth. So yes, consumer agents, but at the same time, like it’s still about buying and selling, supply and demand. Like for everyone on the other, like everyone on one side, you’re going to have to corresponding thing on the other side. And then, you know, the middle is where the magic happens, right? You have a good or a service that someone needs. Someone else needs to, needs to articulate what that need is and their intent is, and let’s see how the transaction actually happens. So that’s a, it’s a super exciting time, I think, for how information flows for how people’s needs are discovered, how transactions actually happen, but the fundamentals don’t change. This is still all about some people having specific needs and then a provider meeting that needs in some way, form.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:28)
Yeah, I think that abstracts things in terms of like building that platform that, know, we’ve talked about the agentic part of that. You know, how do you see optimisely as, you know, your position in the market? mean, you know, I think I’ve stopped paying attention to the like chief Martech graphic with the 18,000. I think we’re up to 15 plus thousand or whatever, but
Rupali Jain (20:50)
stopped counting. ⁓
Greg Kihlstrom (20:51)
I think so. They like fell off the edge of the page or whatever. given all of this, challengers coming from different areas as well, what’s optimized is really role and position in this space.
Rupali Jain (21:06)
goes back to, at the end of the day, we’re in it for the user and we’re in it to help businesses live outcomes. Content is at the heart of a lot of what marketing does, and that’s not changing anytime soon. So for us, with what we are doing with AI and really leading the charge, setting the bar for what good looks like, and creating this platform for the ecosystem is super, super important. As we think about the agent orchestration platform, that is how we see in the market and really enable our customers to achieve end to end. And I think, look, we’re the leaders on the DXP side, we’re the leaders on optimization, people look to us to set the bar, and rightly so, we’re doing that. So to me, it’s about both maintaining and taking our customers with us. Like at the end of the day, like you talk about startups starting out of the woodwork and, there’s a new one every night or more than that. The biggest advantage we have to that party is our customer base, the thousands of customers we have, the thousands of conversations we can have with them, understand the real problems. Because the problem set has not changed. How we solve them, completely different. And so I think Paul Kuzno today said, fall in love with the problem. And that really rings true. And so for us, that’s how we’re doing it. We’re saying agile in terms of how we execute. We’re setting the bar for what good looks like. And we’re enabling the ecosystem so the rising tide can raise all boats.
Because at the end of the day, the customer is who needs to win.
Greg Kihlstrom (22:33)
Yeah, love it. Well, as we wrap up here, just a couple couple last things here. You know, it’s always great to get together at events like this and and see lots of people that we don’t always get to see. What’s been a highlight so far for each of you?
Kevin Li (22:49)
⁓ For me, it’s actually just telling our customers on the capabilities of Opal, the changing of mindset for how to think about agents. People hear about agents and AI all the time, but being able to have a stage this big, have all of our customers here, partners here, to be able to share with them. It’s like, hey, this is now what you can then do and then see their eyes light up. That’s been the biggest highlight.
Rupali Jain (23:11)
My biggest highlight was we were in the cab yesterday and two separate sessions, I was looking at what our customers are doing with the AI and in one of them we did a shark tank style and the other one we’re just walking around looking at what everyone had done. And man, it’s so amazing to see how far the bounds are getting pushed and the excitement on someone’s face when they use AI and it takes them closer and closer to outcome. That was phenomenal because it’s sort of like in the past you were limited by technology.
Now, The World’s Your Oyster is just incredible to watch.
Greg Kihlstrom (23:45)
Love it. Love it. Well, one last question for each of you. I’ll start with you, Kevin. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Kevin Li (23:54)
It’s really hard because the whole space is moving so fast. I think the key thing is about just getting hands on with it. So, five coding is obviously sort of all the rage, you know, I dig into it, I start doing that, I start building on Opal, start building agents. That’s the key thing. I think there’s so many things that were still early that unless you do it yourself and feel that pain and kind of going through it, it’s hard to think about like the larger strategic implications of what’s to happen? Like unless you got to like, ⁓ memory didn’t work here. That’s not elegant. How do we solve memory for enterprises? Like, that’s not a thing that you just can read about or sit there and think about unless you’re actually sort of like in the weeds. I think that’s, that’s the key thing.
Greg Kihlstrom (24:39)
And Rupali, what’s your advice to aspiring leaders to stay agile?
Rupali Jain (24:44)
I think my advice, Kevin gave a lot of suggestions for staying agile. think for aspiring leaders in this world of AI, I’d actually say don’t just focus on the bottom line. Yes, efficiency has been the word of the day. talk about workforces getting replaced, supplemented with AI. I think to me, the biggest opportunity is actually on the top line because AI is going to change the world GDP as we know it. And so how do you want to be a part of that growth is the thing that
I would think about as a leader. And so yes, it’s about agility, but it’s also about the future and being ready for that and not just the world that you see today around you.
