Sitecore Stream - Do more in era of less with AI capabilities, Ideation to execution

Hi Folks,

This blog post is around my point of view from technologist on AI capabilities and orchestration provided by Sitecore Stream, and why it is important to know what it has to offer and RoI for a business and what it has for future roadmap, Because every customer has similar problems and as a technologist you should always try to solve those business problems, and hence below statement comes to my mind  for Sitecore Stream.

A true innovation should start from "Looking at the business problem and then choosing the tech to solve, and not vice versa"

With Sitecore Stream , This is exactly what Sitecore team has done, The product team and technical team worked with marketers and marketing team and with customer to understand their problems and then came up with this amazing innovation and AI capabilities throughout their composable stack.

I will try to simplify things for end audience, so it is easy for them to understand

What is Sitecore Stream? A new Product?

Before we even talk about real life challenges which Sitecore Stream solves, Let's try understanding in extremally simply manner what it Stream.

"Well, It is not a new DxP product, But it is the AI capabilities already available in all the Sitecore DxP products, It is designed to make life of marketers and content authors easy by giving them their brand specific content, and information on tip of their hand with chat like interface."

As we talk, These AI capabilities are already there across all products built in, The biggest win is content authors and marketers get AI capabilities not only while creating marketing campaign but right into their content authoring environment too with XP, XM, XMC what not, With use of GEN AI and power of Microsoft Azure Open AI, Now they can generate the content right from the editor itself.

Now Let's understand what the problems were and why something like this was needed, how was life of a marketers before it and after it.

Problems of marketers or content creators in every organization

Well, generally marketers follow the workflow, where to get the campaign out or getting a page live, they need to go through typical workflow

Now consider following challenges

1) Multiple brands and multiple channels.

2) Lot of old and historic assets and documents on different platforms.

3) Comply with brand guides of all the brands, not all documents are handy and takes lot of time.

4) Make sure they are aligning with the brand strategy, going through all of those documents to align with the brand strategy.

5) Finally make sure tone of voice, fonts, visual guidelines, Grammar align with the brand.

Lot of work right, and in today's world for marketers "There is less budget, less time" but still they need to get "Faster go to market", this is a real challenge and Sitecore Stream comes for a rescue for the very same reason

On top of above challenge, BetterBreifs research says 35% of marketing budget is wasted due to poor briefs, now consider AI at your help, more productive and as they say "Smarter - Strategic - Secure".

How Sitecore Stream Helps in Above Scenario?

1) Brand Aware AI

Sitecore Stream grounds the AI data model to learn against the brand documents uploaded and injected into the portal, This is very SMART way of making sure that all the AI capabilities around the products are targeted specific to your brand, So it is aware about your brand guidelines like tone of voice, which colors to use, which fonts, which images and what not

When you search anything on stream portal or ask anything to AI, It will now give or generate the content or campaign or briefs using your own brand context, which is a huge win.

2) Copilots & Agents

In Stream, there are copilots and agents which helps enhancing productivity by working along with you and doing automated tasks so that you can focus on actually doing what you are supposed to do, either strategy on your next campaign or focus on content which is the at the center and focus of Sitecore

There are multiple types of copilots which are responsible for different things

Brand Copilot

It makes sure that the generated content is aligned with brand's tone, color, voice and identity and context, It gets this context from brand kit documents uploaded from brand-kit section.

Content Copilot

Using this copilot content is generated from the brand kit context, It make sures and assist content authors or markets to add or edit content within the editor.

 

NOTE: Above screenshot is from one of the POC I am doing, I am excited to share it in my next blog

Experience Copilot

It facilitates the feedback loop kind of experience where it helps in content generation, image generation and then gives marketers to edit that content as per their need and run that cycle till content is satisfactory, majorly used for content hub to perform natural language search, visual search, tags images etc. 

3) Agentic Workflows 

It covers overall ideation to execution; End-to-end workflow automation and content creation life cycle using agents and continues cycle of generating a content till the validation and getting final output.

NOTE: Well, One might think that increasing use of the AI might take marketers or content author's job as now it knows the brand and context and also it completely automates lot of things using GEN AI using these copilots.

But the fact is, it will actually increase the productivity of marketers to think about strategy, and they will do more of those work which they should actually be doing and let the technology do these tasks.

Sitecore Stream portal is the orchestration layer, so it's like central collaborative manner task where you can project manage you campaign get the things done 

Technical Insights

Well, Let's talk something about what powers Stream and technology behind it.

1) Sitecore Stream uses Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services, that gives access to LLMs (Large Learning Models) and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which are grounded and trained on brand specific data and documents, it currently uses GTP-4 model, which gives amazing "Brand Aware" AI power.

Some says "Sitecore + Microsoft AI" - Match made in haven :)

2) You can use AI capabilities of Sitecore Stream on any DxP platforms, be it XMC, Search, Content Hub, XP, XM

For XP or XM, you can start using Stream from Sitecore 10.2 onwards and upwards. (Depending on the license and other things but Sitecore Stream supports >=10.2 versions)

See below table to understand which product has what feature of stream already available as you read it (This might change depending on future roadmap or some changes might be there and already implemented too)

(Image Source Credit: From the webinar "Supercharge your marketing engine with AI" by Kelly Masters,Sr. Product Manager at Sitecore and Michele Fisher, Global Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft" Find Here)

3) Sitecore Stream can be accessed in two ways 

• Using online stream app through the Sitecore Cloud Portal

        Login to Stream Cloud Portal and find the Sitecore Stream App (I am going to have a detailed demo and blog around it soon of how stream app is used.)

• From within your composable stack and Sitecore products.

        AI Capabilities within the products are powered by Stream and it is already built into them, and you can start using it today.

4) With capabilities in DxP, you can generate content using AI for your specific brand as well as you can generate multiple versions of the content too.

5) You can do content translations using Strem AI capabilities.

What is the ROI? and why a customer should use Sitecore Stream?

This is my favorite part and section because the whole purpose of this blog so that it adds value to customers using Sitecore and thinking about getting ROI.

Before 4-5 years we all know if a marketing team or content team needs to get the campaign out or create a content for specific brand of a customer, they had to do briefing and find right asset also scan through historical asset and campaigns and find the right style and font which matches with their brand

Before 2-3 years we had external APIs for generative AI using which we could create content, also we could create campaign using ChatGPT and time to market was made little faster.

But today with Stream, Marketers/Content team gets their brand specific asset, font, style, documents everything as per their brand and they literally get it by just asking on using the same chat as prompt and it will generate content right for your brand which is Complient, Proprietary and secure.

One of the case study or a use case is the brand "Nestle", They partnered with Sitecore on the journey to solve those issues of marketers using AI capabilities using Stream. Watch Here

Nestle has over 2000 brands and its huge, consider just to get a campaign out, how many brand strategic document one will need to go through and make sure it aligns with the policy and brand before it is actually live, that is where Stream gave them ROI and faster go to market.

NOTE: If you have a question like we can do the same in ChatGPT or Gemini and get the job done, but remember one thing, It is like having a general knowledge of all kind, it does not know your brand and content it produces could not be compliant for your brand, Where with Sitecore Stream Brand Aware AI, it super charges your content creation and ideation or execution. 

Future Roadmap

Well future of Sitecore Stream is extremally promising, remember these points are subject to change as per the roadmap and plan from Sitecore.

1) Component Creation using AI

There will be possibility of component creation without writing any code, this will be a game changer where marketing team will not have dependency on a developer to create a component, but it will be possible to output the components using NLPs - Natural Language Processing.

2) Creating Content and Variants

More improvements in the way content is being generated using GEN-AI and making it useful of content authors and marketers to generate variations of content and images.

There are so many other AI capabilities planned but I only have listed which are shared publicly on the web or in Sitecore webinars. 

Summary

“Content is a king and still a king, but without relevance it's nothing”, when we say relevance it's again the experiences, so with relevant content, it captures attention, it drives more engagement and of course it creates a strong brand loyalty.

And there for you know having stream is needed in this digital space is because you need things faster, relevant, faster go to market and with top notch experiences.

NOTE: With Sitecore Stream customer data is fully secure.

Next blog post, I will show the actual business use case and how it addresses the faster go to market and so much of productivity by actually demoing the product.