Opticon New York & The Strategy on Upgrading to CMS 13 & Commerce 15

1. All the key announcements and what it means for your company and organisation
2. A bit more about the strategy around CMS13 and Commerce15 upgrades

Opticon Takeaways

Obviously, as expected, this year, one of the biggest pieces of excitement following the launch of Opal a year ago is everything that has been achieved and delivered on that platform and the amazing heights that the platform has grown to in the last year.

Opal is now a fully agentic platform and had a rename

Opal has now expanded in masses of capabilities in its agentic structure, workflows, and the addition of new features at Opticon. As part of this, there was a rename in how we talk about this

1. The platform as a whole is now the Optimizely agent platform
2. The specific marketing operational models (that are post trained) and agent experience are specifically now called Mark (Mark - Eting :p)

Virtual Teamates allow automomous operation

Although we have had workflows for a little while now that can be scheduled or triggered, Virtual Teamates now bring a layer of autonomous operation as an AI specific teammate that can do specific operations and work with the team https://www.optimizely.com/solutions/virtual-teammates 

1. Teamates have an Opti ID identity, making them a unique member of the team
2. They have user memory to allow all the activities they are working on to be remembered the same way as any user
3. Teammates have specific profiles with resume style skills that explain they goals such as SEO & AI Search Analyst or Chief of Staff
4. Teammates are optimised for the AI operations they do, which means using Mark's post-training models. This is faster, more effective, and cheaper!
5. Teammates are autonomous and can interact on their own and can collaborate using chat with other agents and humans in the platform and with connected systems like Microsoft Teams and Slack 

Marketing Benchmark

While many AI models out there have specific benchmarking profiles that allow models to be tested and validated (which is a continuous source of how different frontier models are graded when they are released), there has been no benchmark system for marketing-specific models. 

Therefore, Optimizely has created one and has open sourced it so it can be used with any other marketing AI models. They are using this to grade their own system of their post-trained models and can show that not only is it 10 to 20 times cheaper for the marketing models they are better that their tasks

There are 285 tasks, 6,523 criteria. Optimizely Agent Platform scored 67% vs. Claude Code's 60%, at 2x efficiency.

Optimization and personalization updates

Optimizely covered more around continuous optimisation and one-to-one limitless personalization. 

With the new agentic experience in filters, dynamic landing pages can be created based upon any request, allowing true one-to-one, limitless personalization and newer  self-improving digital experiences will allow personalization to continually optimise itself based upon a loop of optimisation processes with built-in guardrails allow true optimized automation.

AI is not a cost cutter. It is a growth strategy

One of the key takeaways from Alex here was that we should look at these AI tools as a way of providing growth and reducing areas of friction for our human employees. By taking away painstaking and laborious tasks from employees and providing them to AI, we should be opening those employees up to empower their ability to drive growth and creativity in their areas of expertise. Allow the humans to be the ones driving creativity and driving new ideas, and take away the stuff that they dislike doing, the stuff that's monotonous, and give that to AI. 

Instead of seeing AI as a way of reducing human employees or cutting costs, we look at it as a way of freeing up those employees to do things that they can do to make the company better.

Support growth instead of reducing costs. 

Optimizely CMS 13 + Commerce 15: A platform upgrade for connectivity

It has not been that long since we had the big CMS 12 and Commerce 14 releases, which were so much of a major re-platform (as they moved from .NET Framework to .NET Core) that they required large amounts of investment in doing upgrades. They had masses of technical changes that needed to be actioned based upon whether plugins still existed, whether the technology still existed, or whether we needed to strategically change how the solutions were worked. This large amount of investment has had customers questioning whether they need to move to CMS 13 and Commerce 15, and if the level of investment is going to be the same cost. 

No, it isn't

CMS13 and Commerce15 are still on the same fundamental technology, now supporting .NET 10. This means that a lot of the challenges that we faced when it comes to an upgrade (because we had a large technology change) are not the same ones we will be facing when it comes to an upgrade. 

What CMS 13 and Commerce 15 do include is a couple of key pieces of technology that are integrated with the platforms that have changed. 

• Opti ID - Opti ID is a single sign-on solution through Optimizely's own identity platform built on Okta, which then allows you to use your own identity platforms, such as Entra, to identify individual users. Opti ID is a framework upgrade that is required for CMS 13 because it connects that single identity across all Optimizely products, such as Graph, CMS, Commerce, CMP, and, most importantly, the Optimizely agent platform. 
• Optimizely Graph - Search and navigation is an old platform by now and has many architectural, performance, and technological issues that have been solved with Optimizely Graph. However, the key part of Optimizely Graph is that this platform allows the indexing of all of your CMS and commerce content, and even external content, into one single source of truth. This source of truth can be integrated not only through backend keys but through frontend keys, when it comes to frontend hosting (such as the Optimizely frontend hosting, Vercel or Netlify), but also to any other connected system, such as a chatbot or AI. This is a key piece of technology for connectivity.
• Optimizely Agent Platform (Mark) - With Opti ID and Graph connected, we can get the CMS properly, fully integrated with context and knowledge of the user and all of the data into the Optimizely agent platform (which allows us to have complex agent-based workflows across CMS, commerce, and CMP). Now, with the new Virtual Teamates, 1 to 1 personalization and complicated workflows, we can automate aspects of website optimisation around GEO/AEO experimentation and delivering fresh content personalised to the individual user 
• Optimizely Connect Platform - With direct native integration into the Optimizely Connect platform, we can now connect CMS13 directly into other external data sources and workflows so that the platforms can integrate seamlessly without needing development effort. And with Graph here, we have all of the data to connect these systems together as effortlessly as possible. 
• Optimizely DAM - With Graph being the fundamental connectivity system, we can now have the Optimizely DAM, the CMS, and the Optimizely Agent platform all connected together. With the new pricing model from Optimizely, we can also move content assets that used to be in Azure Blob Storage over to the Optimizely DAM, which is included for any CMS13 customer, saving licence costs. 

Why CMS 13 and Commerce 15 are a strategy for your organisation 

As we have mentioned here, these products that we're integrating, which are the core heart of an upgrade, are there to be able to drive connectivity and integration for your system. You can now see that the content management system is not just a siloed place for content for your website. Now that it's connected via graph, through the agent platform, through the connect platform, through the DAM, it can be directly integrated across the workflow of your marketing organisation.

It is now a central place to connect all of your strategy around your website, to connect your agentic vision, and integrate with any of your systems that you need it to be able to provide a forward strategy for 2026 and beyond. 

Here at Niteco, we have invested in the last number of years in providing AI-driven accelerators to take you from CMS 11 to 12 and 12 to 13, and from Commerce 13 to 14 and 14 to 15. We have delivered over 500 upgraded websites with our expertise through our AI delivery and upgrade teams and our specialist solution architects. We can help you drive your path to upgrade faster, providing your business with the tools it needs without needing to wait for the delivery. Our automated processes, validation, and testing processes can drive this delivery in weeks rather than quarters, contact us today to help with your staregy and upgrade delivery https://niteco.com/contact-us/ 

Overview

As you can see, Optimizely has been pushing the boundaries on their agentic platform throughout the last year and is providing many, many new features. The velocity of feature deliveries has gone up over double what was delivered in 2025, to what's been delivered in 2026. With the addition of Virtual Teamates, limitless personalization, autonomous optimisation, and the upgrades that we can deliver into CMS 13 and Commerce 15, we are truly connecting Optimizely into the best platform for marketers. Where the operation of both human creativity and agentic comes together to provide the best opportunity for your organisation and its future. And on top of everything they've delivered by providing an open-source framework for grading marketing models, Optimizely are showing their continued investment and drive into making their platform the best in the world as an AI agentic platform for marketers. 

For help realising this workflow or providing streamlined, super-fast upgrades, contact Niteco, and we can help you with your digital strategy and accelerating fast, optimised upgrades. 

https://niteco.com/contact-us/