Opticon London: come and meet your new colleagues

Opticon London is on 13 October, and if you're anything like me and thinking ahead, you'll already have a slightly chaotic list of sessions on the go and a plan to be in three places at once. So here's my starter for 10, covering what I think deserves your attention and where to find us on the day. 

The high level 

AI runs through most of the agenda this year, which will surprise precisely nobody. What's interesting is how far the conversation has moved. Optimizely now describes itself as the AI platform for marketing, and the emphasis sits firmly on the work AI can take on inside a real marketing team. If you followed the announcements from Opticon New York, think of London as the go-again, with the advantage of walking in already cogitating. 

Your new colleagues 

The headline act is Virtual Teammates. There are five roles at launch, Chief of Staff, SEO & AI Search Analyst, Marketing Analyst, Personalization Strategist and CRO Manager, with more promised. Each has its own identity and permissions, and by default it drafts and proposes work for a person to approve before it acts. Intriguing, right? 

I find it useful to think of them as new starters. They'll need a proper onboarding, a probation period before anyone hands them the keys, and someone in the team who owns what they produce. Agree that before the first one starts, and everything after gets easier. 

Meet Mark 

You'll hear the name Mark a lot, so spare a thought for every marketer actually called Mark - I know at least seven, maybe seventeen - whose inbox is about to get very confusing. Opal is now the Optimizely Agent Platform (you'll still see the Opal name around for a while as we all adjust), and Mark is how Optimizely personifies it. Optimizely has also announced a family of purpose-built, post-trained marketing models under the Mark banner, which are coming soon to Agent Platform customers. 

This is the bit I'd encourage you to kick about more on the day. Because the models are built specifically for marketing work, the promise is the same job for a fraction of the cost, and Optimizely reports 10x greater cost efficiency than frontier models in early testing. If the token bill has already come up in your leadership team, ask the Optimizely team when the models arrive and what they could mean for your credits. 

Alongside them sits Mark-Bench, Optimizely's benchmark for AI on real marketing work, now covering 17 marketing domains and due to be open-sourced soon. It's a smart move from Optimizely. Benchmarks give us a way to evidence and project the likely gains, which makes the business case for adoption much easier to build. 

Why CMS 13 keeps coming up 

Optimizely is putting real weight behind getting customers onto CMS 13 as the route to its newest AI capabilities, and the reasons to move are lining up nicely. It's the foundation for Optimizely's agentic CMS roadmap. Content variations let a single piece of content carry several published versions, and Optimizely Graph comes as standard. Opal Chat (oops! I mean Mark) now ships with CMS 13 for organisations on the Agent Platform, there are agents for page building and content modelling, and an MCP server lets AI tools work directly with your content. AND Optimizely has introduced Agent-Ready Experiences, which use WebMCP to let customers' own agents act on a website. Phew. 

Alongside all this, Agent Visibility, built with Conductor, already shows how your brand turns up in AI-generated answers. If you're still on CMS 12, expect the upgrade conversation to come up more than once. 
 
The good news is that the move itself is getting easier. AI is changing what a version or site migration looks like, and you'll hear real stories of it at Opticon – What I Learned Moving 2,500 Pages in 4.5 Weeks is one to look out for. It's close to our hearts too. Nimbus, our own AI-assisted content migration tool, already takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of moving content, and we're working with Optimizely on ways to make the path to CMS 13 quicker still. More on that soon. 

Personalisation, done right 

Done right, personalisation is the holy grail of digital experience. It's also always been limited by how many decisions a team can realistically make, and by the effort of producing endless content variants, governing them and measuring what works. This is why so much of it still runs on broad rules and a handful of segments. With Limitless 1:1 Personalization, a capability within the Agent Platform, and the Personalization Strategist teammate, that limit starts to move. Honestly, it's the part I'm most excited about. 

Sessions I'd circle 

The importance of keeping humans in the loop, and the value people bring will run through the whole day, and I suspect it'll be the most useful thread to pull on. In other words, experience and judgement matter more, not less. The more an agent can do, the more it matters that someone has decided what good looks like, and most marketing teams have never had to write that down. 

We start early, and the opening general session at 8:45 sets the tone. Alex Atzberger is joined by Cate Lochead from Bentley and Anthony Ben Sadoun from ASOS, and the agenda promises big news, so I'd get a good seat. If you can make it in sooner, Tom Bramley's Agentic CMS rapid roadmap at 8:20 is the quickest way into the CMS 13 story, and it runs again at 3:20 if breakfast wins. 

Mona Chen's Agent Platform roadmap at 10:45 is the one for Mark, Virtual Teammates and anyone setting next year's budget. 

Then 11:15 makes you choose. Hire a virtual teammate in the Agent Lodge shows one being built live. AI needs to be lazier, a short tent talk from Nikita Bokil, sounds like the right place to kick the token question about. And AI is changing faster than your org chart brings our wonderful clients, Mott MacDonald and CIPD, into a peer discussion about the people side, which is where you'll find me. 

At midday, Mark Wakelin's tent talk, The best page on your website doesn't exist yet, looks at personalisation that composes something new for each visitor rather than choosing between options – the perfect warm-up for ours. The afternoon general session at 1:45 brings News UK, The Marketing Academy and Shazam together on what it really takes to lead through AI. 

If you can't make it to London, Opticon Online on 21 October covers similar ground. 

4pm, The Outpost, Barbican Hall 

I personally encourage you to see “the main act” - our session, He's Just Not That Into You: Personalization That Earns, is at 4pm in The Outpost, Barbican Hall, with Stephen Abram, Skye O'Leary and John Prior from MSQ DX, and yes, the title is deliberate. It brings a little Hollywood logic to brands: read the signals well and customers feel wooed rather than pursued, and that attention turns into trust that lasts. Come for the fun RomCom references, leave with insights and an action plan.  If personalisation is anywhere in your plans for next year, it's the session to be in. There's a WebMCP tent talk at 4:20 too, but I'd obviously rather you were with us. 

Come and say hello 

As gold sponsors, MSQ DX are all over Opticon London – literally and metaphorically. Book time with us on the day, swing by our sponsorship booth, throw an axe and make a connection at our axe throwing booth or pull up at our talk at 4pm.  You can find everything we're doing at Opticon London on our landing page Hope to see you at the Barbican!