Sitecore ran a panel at SUGCON Europe. Four people on stage: Scott Liewehr (Global VP of Market Strategy), Sean Broderick (Senior Director of Customer and Community), Ruadhan Berry (VP of Product Management), and Jackie Baxter (Director of Digital Strategy).

Here's what they said. No spin.

Sitecore AI is actually being used

First the progress report. Since Symposium, Sitecore shipped what they promised. Then they shipped two more releases of Agentic Studio, one in February, one in March.

The number that stood out: over 30% of Sitecore customers are using the AI capabilities day to day. Ruadhan said he didn't expect it to be that high. Enterprise AI adoption is usually pretty limited. People are actually using brand kits, translation, A/B and multivariate testing.

He also thanked the community for breaking things and telling Sitecore about it. That's how the product gets better.

Structured content is the whole game

Sean asked where Sitecore fits in the AI future. Ruadhan was honest. Nobody knows what websites will look like. But the signals are clear enough.

Over 90% of AI interactions don't end in a website visit. Over 20% of Google search results now contain an AI overview or summary.

So whether someone lands on your site or not, what matters is well-structured, well-sourced content that's actually available. That's the thing Sitecore is built for.

Is the momentum real?

Sean put Scott on the spot. Scott has an analyst background, so he's seen Sitecore from the outside.

His honest take: for a while, he thought the brand was slipping. Sitecore felt like the whipping boy. He compared it to the old Ektron days, when every vendor wanted the client list so they could pick customers off.

That's changed. From the inside, he's watching Sitecore win deals. He's watching Sitecore get pulled into deals it wouldn't have been in before.

Sean added a data point from the room. Over 30% of SUGCON Europe attendees this year are customers. That's a record.

Jackie on how she actually uses Sitecore AI

Jackie uses it for the stuff nobody wants to do.

Her example: the sales team comes to her with an ABM campaign. 100 clients. Each one needs its own page. Cool, there goes the weekend.

Except now, it doesn't. Derek built her team Sitecore AI and ABM agents that personalize each page per client and update dynamically when better content comes along.

The time saved is nice. The stress it takes off her team is better. These are the tasks everyone knows how to do but nobody wants to own.

She also made a point about the partnership side. When things work, she tells the product team. When her kids break something she wasn't supposed to break, she tells them that too.

Where customers will get the most value

Ruadhan's answer was content.

Google has signaled it will start penalizing AI slop and rewarding well-cited, well-sourced content. So more content isn't the game. Citation is.

And here's the catch. Citation doesn't come from the content you think it does. LLMs hate HTML. It's expensive for them to process a web page. Content that's easy for a crawler or training bot to consume is what actually helps you get cited.

So the opportunity isn't just web pages. It's content in general, built to improve how AI systems cite you.

Scott on authenticity

Scott plugged a piece Sitecore published in CMSWire about digital authenticity. The study asked people how they feel about brands using AI.

His starting assumption matched mine, probably yours. LinkedIn is full of AI slop. You see the hyphens, you keep scrolling. If they couldn't be bothered to write it, why should you read it.

But here's his actual argument. The sloppiness isn't the ceiling. It's the floor. It's what happens when people don't care.

Think about a founder. One voice, clear, distinctive. Then the company grows. 100 people on the marketing team. The voice dilutes. That's normal and also kind of sad.

AI, used properly, can hold that voice. You can train it on the brand. You can keep the voice consistent at scale in a way humans genuinely can't. Artificial, yes. But it can actually sound more authentic than the alternative.

Jackie's one piece of advice: look at your content

Jackie's SUGCON session is on intelligent content. Her big message is almost embarrassingly basic.

Look at your content.

She framed it through the people, process, platform triangle. Everyone obsesses over platform. Is there a tech that can help me do this better. The answer is almost always yes. But the people and the process get ignored.

Her bet: everyone in the room has at least one or two pages on their site with no JSON schema markup. Because when it was written, you didn't need it.

LLMs don't care. They'll crawl the darkest corner of your site and surface something you don't remember saying, that might not even be true anymore.

Her team has done three rounds of content audits in the last 18 months. They're doing another one now. Adding JSON schema takes time. Auditing content takes time. Start now.

What's coming in May

Spring release drops May 14. Ruadhan gave three themes.

1. Agentic Studio keeps expanding.
2. Conversion. People come to your site, you want them to convert. New capabilities in that area.
3. Orchestration. Tools that support marketers doing their actual day job.

Some things from Symposium are now in GA or about to hit GA. Sign up for the release event. Send feedback. If you break it, tell Ruadhan.

The Gartner question

Scott closed on analysts. Sitecore is already in the leader quadrant on a recent Gartner CMP evaluation, furthest right for completeness of vision. November is the big one. The DXP Magic Quadrant.

This will be the first time Sitecore is evaluated as the combined entity across the analyst community post-acquisition. Scott feels good heading in.

One thing has changed about how Gartner works. It used to be one analyst, one laptop, one demo. You could charm them or not. Now Gartner leans heavily on Gartner Peer Insights. These are verified reviews. You have to be a real customer on the platform.

Scott's ask to the room was simple. If you're a customer, write a GPI review. The more reviews Gartner sees, the more they trust what Sitecore is telling them.