One Amazing Thing Optimizely Virtual Teammates with Kevin Li

Despite all the marketing tools and AI available today, I don’t know a single marketer who isn’t at least as busy as they were a year ago — if not busier. But what if you had a virtual teammate that could take on marketing work on its own, and collaborate with the rest of your team and your platforms while it did?

Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Optimizely. Today I’m talking with Kevin Li, SVP, Product at Optimizely, about Virtual Teammates — role-specific AI agents that work alongside marketing teams instead of waiting to be prompted.

Watch the Demo

What You’ll See in This Demo

Optimizely is an AI platform for marketing that brings content management, experimentation, personalization, commerce, and analytics into one system. In this episode, Kevin Li, SVP of Product at Optimizely, demonstrates Virtual Teammates: role-specific AI agents — a CRO manager, a marketing analyst, an SEO and AI search analyst, a personalization strategist, and a chief of staff — that are hired, onboarded, and given tool access the way a human employee would be. Each teammate works proactively on a schedule, keeps its own identity and permissions, and collaborates with both humans and other agents. It’s most useful for marketing teams that want recurring analysis, auditing, and optimization work to happen without someone having to start it.

Key Takeaways

• Most AI assistants used in marketing today are reactive: they do nothing until a human writes a prompt, which pushes the cognitive work back onto the marketer.
• AI tools in marketing are also single-player — moving output from one person’s assistant to a colleague is usually still a copy and paste.
• Traditional agentic workflows are static: the thousandth run is no better than the first, because the workflow never learns.
• Optimizely’s Virtual Teammates are role-specific AI agents defined like job listings, with responsibilities, required tools, and a set of recurring jobs to be done.
• Optimizely launched five roles: CRO manager, marketing analyst, SEO and AI search analyst, personalization strategist, and chief of staff.
• Each virtual teammate is onboarded like an employee — given its own identity, credentials, and scoped permissions to tools like GA4, Google Search Console, and Conductor — which is what makes governance and audit trails possible.
• Virtual teammates deliver work proactively on a schedule, so a site audit or performance report can be waiting before the marketer starts their day.
• Multiple humans and multiple AI agents can collaborate in the same workspace on the same asset, instead of passing output between separate tools.
• Optimizely’s position is that virtual teammates are not replacing marketing jobs — they are doing work that already isn’t getting done, like schema maintenance and accessibility scans.
• The strategic craft of marketing (messaging, positioning, differentiation) stays with humans; the unglamorous recurring work is what moves to agents.

About The Guest

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/

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FAQs

Chapters

00:00 Why marketers are busier than ever, even with AI
01:05 Kevin Li on Optimizely’s AI platform for marketing
02:10 Three reasons AI adoption stalls: reactive, single-player, static
05:16 Demo: the Virtual Teammate hiring board
06:16 What an AI teammate’s job description looks like
08:52 Multiplayer collaboration between humans and AI agents
09:14 Identity, tool access, and governance
10:00 Proactive work delivered before you start your day
12:03 Do virtual teammates replace marketing jobs?
14:29 Where to learn more

Resources

Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com

The One Amazing Thing with Greg Kihlström website: https://agilebrandguide.com/the-agile-brand-podcasts/one-amazing-thing-about-with-greg-kihlstrom/

Sign up for The Agile Brand newsletter here: https://www.gregkihlstrom.com

Get the latest news and updates on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-brand/

Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com

From the creators and host of the award-winning The Agile Brand™ with Greg Kihlström podcast, comes One Amazing Thing About… with Greg Kihlström, a show that puts the spotlight on the latest and greatest MarTech products and platforms by showcasing one feature that makes them… amazing.

Transcript

Transcript — One Amazing Thing About Optimizely Virtual Teammates with Kevin Li, SVP Product at Optimizely.

Greg Kihlström (00:00)
Despite all the marketing tools and AI tools available today, I don’t know a single marketer that isn’t at least as busy, if not more, than they were a year ago. But what if you could have a virtual teammate that could help you with your marketing work, plus work with the rest of your team and platform seamlessly?

Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Optimizely. Today we’re talking with Kevin Li SVP product at Optimizely, and he’s going to be sharing one amazing thing about their virtual teammates with us today. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin (00:38)
Thanks, Greg. Good to see you again. Excited for Opticon, I hope.

Greg Kihlström (00:41)
Absolutely. Yeah. Always always great to see you. Yeah. Looking forward to it. and yeah, this is this is going live right in the right in the midst of of Opticon. So we’ll we’ll be able to give everybody a a a nice a nice look at stuff. So yeah. so but before we dive into everything, for those that are are less familiar with with Optimizely, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role there.

Kevin (01:05)
Yeah, sure. my name’s Kevin Lee. I run a CP product here at Optimizely We’ve been embarking on building the AI platform for marketing. many, many customers know us obviously in the A B testing experimentation space. we also obviously are very strong in the content management and overall content supply chain workflow areas. and and for the last year and a half or so, we’ve been embarking on on building our agent platform itself. It’s a

AI harness for those of you who are a little more technical. It’s an AI harness specifically built for marketing, sort of run overall product strategy and and you know, up through LLMs to how do we think about digital employees and virtual teammates across the board. So sit within our product organization and get to do fun things like these to to talk about our new innovations.

Greg Kihlström (01:56)
Yeah, love it. Yeah. And can’t can’t wait to take a look here in a second. Before we do though, you know, we’re gonna look at virtual teammates. So you know, why why do you choose this feature to to showcase today? Who’s the audience? Why’s them why is it important to them?

Kevin (02:10)
Yeah, I think as as agents and LMs have kind of taken over the world, I get like, you know, it’s sort of almost obvious that like at some point humans and agentic beings, right? And agenti entities that are gonna collaborate together. So think about it as like digital employees, digital coworkers type of a thing. and and for us, this is an important launch because we we really see it as sort of a paradigm shift in terms of how how humans and and

you know, agents or digital employees sort of interact with each other. generally speaking, we sort of see almost three shortcomings, if you will, for how AI is being adopted today. I think there’s still a lot of excitement, but adoption is still hard. Sort of three barriers to it. One, I’m sure you you probably sense this too. When you use an LLM chat bar, agent assistant today, it is very reactive in nature. If Greg doesn’t start something, it doesn’t

Do anything for you. It’s always like you have to make the first move, which if you then did think about it, that’s actually quite a bit of cognitive and labor tax because now the human has to go like, yeah, let me prompt something. And and and you know, don’t get me started on like prompting and and and and how to prompt correctly and and well, right? So the the proactive reactive thing. The second thing is really around this collaboration piece of it. So again, using a sort of personal example, I’m sure you have your favorite AI tool, Greg, but imagine if you want it.

To share something with me. You are doing control C, control V. Right? Like we

Greg Kihlström (03:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin (03:42)
have this amazing innovation that’s apparently life-changing, but just getting it from one human being to another one is a control C control V operation. That that’s that’s nuts. Right. So how then, let alone like why can’t the two of us collaborate with multiple AI entities at the same time? Right. So we sort of go from this single player to multiplayer. And then a third thing is agents today are

They’re they’re agentic workflows, but the workflow itself is very static in nature. That workflow doesn’t get smarter over time. Right?

Greg Kihlström (04:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin (04:14)
So you build an agent, you run it, you can run it a thousand times, it’s gonna do the same thing at the time. The thousandth time isn’t actually better than the first. So, but how does it actually self-improve? So it’s on those three premises that we’ve sort of built and brought virtual teammates to market.

And why I think we’re we’re very excited about it is sort of this like, yeah, like, you know, I think there are many, many companies who are touting sort of like teammates, but I but I think, you know, we’ve figured out the right combination of like how to actually build this and how to architect it from the ground up to have it truly be a digital coworker. and Alvar is sort of that tiering test, which is like, you know, is it, is it, it is it doing enough real work for you to maybe not be able to tell the difference if it’s a

human coworker or digital coworker. You know, what a that’s a that’s a twenty twenty-six I think statement if if we’ve ever heard one, right?

Greg Kihlström (05:06)
Yeah, yeah. Totally.

Totally. Love it. Well yeah, let’s I I I wanna take a look. So yeah, let’s let’s let’s take a look here. Why don’t you share your screen?

Kevin (05:16)
Yeah, let let’s let’s let’s dive in and take a look. All right. So

The way we’ve set this up is is very similar to hiring and and interviewing for like a a hu a human coworker. So you kind of start off. So so what we’re doing, so you’re what you’re seeing here is sort of the the directory of virtual teammates. we’re launching with four role specific virtual teammates. So CRO manager is conversion rate optimization manager. That’s a job that like you can go on, like, I don’t know, any job board and and and actually go apply for.

A marketing analyst is gonna take a look at like traffic and GA4 and so on and so forth, an SEO, an AI search analyst, and then a personalization strategist, and then a sort of more generic like chief of staff, executive assistant, like like type of a thing. speaking of which I I think, you know, Greg, you could probably use a virtual chief of staff. right, so so maybe, right? So so so that’s

Greg Kihlström (06:13)
Ma maybe, yeah.

Kevin (06:16)
how we kind of think about it.

It’s on the hiring screen. We we humanize it a little bit to sort of bring the whole digital coworker piece of it across. And and if you sort of sort of notice, right, like as these like why hire me, it’s kinda like a job board type of a field. It’s a why hire me, the experience, what tools, right? Like y you know, in in in like I I think still today, like people’s resumes are like, I’m proficient in Microsoft PowerPoint. But like nowadays it’s like, Hey, if you’re if you’re gonna apply for a job.

And be like, I I want to be an SEO and AI search analyst. Like, you better be able to use, you know, like in this case with partnership with Conductor. You gotta be able to use Conductor to look at SEO stuff. You know, you need to know G A G A4 for web traffic and Google Search Console. Like those are the basic tools that you would need to be able to do this. Right. And then the details part is actually interesting and sort of actually feels like, you know, a full-blown resume, which is like, yeah, you know, people.

Marketing orgs don’t have time and bandwidth to like monitor all the SEO keywords and and look at how they perform on LLMs, et cetera. So this virtual teammate is able to plug into these specific tools. And these are the jobs, these four things are the jobs to be done. And you can kind of see how often they actually do it. It’s like a complete job role spec’d out in software. Okay. And so

It runs behind the scenes, et cetera. If we then you know look at a different one, a marketing analyst one, right? So I look at this one and we can see it’s like, like what’s your job? your job is to look at GA4 and turn it into decision ready stuff, fix schedules. Like it’s a different set of activities, jobs to be done for this specific virtual teammate. So the the context here is we we’ve sort of built out, you know, let’s just take a look at like another one, a CRO manager, right? Your job is.

To do conversion rate optimization, you have sort of different skills. And then if you look at how different this is, it’s like your job is to go ideate experiments, design them, build them, monitor them, and then like tell me what you learned about them, right? Which is kind of like what you would expect a CRO specialist to do. and so this is kind of how we’ve been thinking about it. And then when you hire somebody, right, it’s literally you can give it a name, like to to do whatever you want, and you literally go through an onboarding process, like you connect the right tools.

Each of these virtual teammates have their own identity, et cetera. So so that that’s like the the gist of it. It’s like a hiring board. and and you can choose your your own and you can modify the jobs to be done there. Any questions so far? Any comments you wanna kinda throw in?

Greg Kihlström (08:52)
No, no, I mean this yeah, this the definitely I could use I could probably use all all five of these to be honest.

Kevin (08:58)
Yeah.

Greg Kihlström (08:58)
But yeah, and I I think to your to your other point, I mean the the the my assumption here is that multiple people can interact with these as opposed to what you were saying, the copy and paste problem that we

Kevin (09:10)
That’s right.

Greg Kihlström (09:11)
have with you know with other tools. I won’t name names, but yeah.

Kevin (09:14)
Yeah, that

that that’s right. So like so then if I if I kind of then show two quick things, right? Then the I’m I’m within a specific virtual teammate now, you know, GO two. and then you can see their upcoming work. You can see what they’ve already completed running the tasks, right? They have their own identity, they have their own access to tools, they have their own product connections like to GA four, the right permissions, et cetera. So this is like

the configuration governance thing. Like like if you think about like if if you hired someone new and you’re like your job is to go do AI search and LLM visibility, like you would give them a laptop. So okay, so like I mean it’s it’s in a browser, right? But you would give them like here’s your login to the

Greg Kihlström (09:54)
Yeah.

Kevin (09:54)
software that we have, right? Like no one magically starts on day one and has to write credentials to GA4. No one

Greg Kihlström (09:59)
Right, right.

Kevin (10:00)
starts right. So that’s that’s what this is. And then there’s like little fun things where like you can have a they can have an identity and a and a and kind of a personality etc.

Right. So that’s the the the the piece of it. And then what happens is really then I’m the human manager in this specific case. And this is like Geo, my teammate, right, actually doing the work at 643 this morning, before I I I got up, right? And and said, Hey, I did these things. I ran a homepage audit. I did a whatever. Here’s the outcome. Here’s the report. And then

Like it’s literally sending me some outcomes for like what has actually happened and what is Geo in this case actually sort of like doing. again, a demo thing as an example, but it’s telling me like, hey, I did these things, these are what the specific issues, et cetera. And you know, go go do something. And there’s a live thing that was that was generated specifically. Right. So that’s the the key part, which is I didn’t have to initiate something in in in particular. I’m

getting something proactive from my virtual teammate. My virtual teammate is doing the stuff that you actually saw. And in this overall sort of an experience, I can literally start talking to, for example, like if I wanted to that that that these are all virtual teammates. So I can literally start a conversation with virtual teammates and a human to collaborate together on an asset or something along those lines. So like

That’s kind of the power. And if you recall to the very beginning, we wanted to be proactive. We want to be self-learning. So each of these are updating their own sort of like virtual teammate markdown files for what they’re supposed to do. And then the multiplayer collaboration where different humans like different humans literally, right? Different human coworkers and virtual coworkers can collaborate sort of within the same space on artifacts and and work output.

Greg Kihlström (12:03)
Yeah, love it, love it. Yeah. And you know, I I was just interviewing someone a few minutes ago talking about, you know, most marketers feel like they’re doing the work of three different people. So now we have this thing where, you know, this this thing does your work, d does part of that part of your job. Some of the stuff is I mean, it’s part of their job, but it’s not the fun part or the strategic part or or all of that stuff. And so they get to show up to work with

all

of that stuff done so that they can be more strategic, right? I mean this is all this is all kind of that that augmentation

Kevin (12:37)
Yeah.

Greg Kihlström (12:38)
part that marketers don’t become marketers to plug into some of these tools. They do it to like build better strategies, get better results, right?

Kevin (12:48)
That that’s right. Like I think I think it’s it’s interesting because you know, obviously one question we always get is like, hey, like is this gonna like replace a bunch of people’s jobs, et cetera? Like, and and honestly, our opinion on that is is it’s not. It what it is is a lot of virtual teammates are doing the work that literally isn’t getting done today.

Greg Kihlström (13:07)
Yeah.

Kevin (13:09)
you know, like I’ll I’ll give you a good example. show me a website that has

Perfect schema for SEO and and I and I’ll show you like a sparkly purple unicorn. Like you know what I mean? Like it doesn’t that doesn’t exist, right? Or to your point, show me a marketer who’s excited waking up in the morning to scan pages for accessibility compliance. Right? But like

Greg Kihlström (13:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin (13:35)
the work is what is our messaging? Like, how do we stand out from the competition? What is our value prop? The craft of marketing.

hasn’t changed. And if anything else, I think many, many companies are just moving so much faster on things like product development. We have that. Like our marketers today work harder than ever before and more hours than ever before. They would love to have some of these specific virtual teammates just fill in the gaps and also do what previously wasn’t possible before so they can actually focus on a net new thing. Like we really don’t think it’s a zero sum game when it comes to like the craft of marketing.

Greg Kihlström (14:13)
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Well this is this I I definitely think this qualifies as amazing. So I’ll looking forward to diving in more with it as well. And and certainly looking forward to to Opticon as well. If people want to learn more about this, where where should they go?

Kevin (14:29)
Yeah, optimizely dot com, right there. And it’s gonna be, you know, obviously we do a whole lot, but from from there, you can you can look at, you know, the agents we have and the virtual teammates and and all of those specific things. So just our our main website is is the place to go.

Greg Kihlström (14:44)
Love it. Well, always great talking with you, Kevin. Again, I’d like to thank Kevin Li SVP product at Optimizely for joining the show. You can learn more about Kevin and Optimizely by following the links in the show notes.