Opticon 2024 Stockholm highlights: Optimizely innovations empowering businesses in the promising Nordic market
Opticon 2024 in Stockholm wasn’t just an event - it was a roadmap for the future. As the event’s regular sponsor, Niteco team gained valuable insights into key trends shaping the digital landscape. Our CEO Pelle Niklasson also noted the growing optimism surrounding the Nordic market and emphasized now is the best time to start planning for 2025. With groundbreaking innovations in the Optimizely platform, from AI-driven experimentation and personalization to cutting-edge Ecommerce features - the future of business in this region looks more promising than ever. Keep reading to discover more key takeaways from the event and how they can shape your digital strategy.
If you missed Opticon24 in Stockholm, join us at Opticon24 London on October 1st to gain jaw-dropping insights.
Promising Nordic market: A model for global markets
At Opticon 2024 Stockholm, Niteco team was struck by the Nordic region's optimistic and proactive approach to digital transformation. While some markets are still cautious, the Nordic businesses were already looking ahead, confident that digital solutions will drive future success. According to Statista, Ecommerce revenue in the Nordics is forecast to steadily increase across several segments until 2029, reaching a remarkable $56.92 billion. This positive trend illustrates the abundant opportunities for businesses prepared to invest in digital platforms now to capture a larger share of this growing market.
Niteco CEO Pelle Niklasson discussed with Opticon 2024 attendees about how Niteco can help skyrocket their site performance and boost their business bottom line.
Key trends your business can’t ignore
We’ve long recognized that AI, agile architecture, and flexible platforms are no longer just buzzwords—they’re essential for staying competitive. At Opticon 2024 Stockholm, they were stressed once again. Businesses just cannot ignore these trends for sustained success in such a hectic market.
- AI: As one of the must-watch Ecommerce trends of 2024, AI and machine learning are driving more relevant and targeted experiences for customers. Brands that embrace these technologies will be able to offer the personalized interactions that customers now expect.
- Agile, scalable architectures: The move toward headless commerce and composable architectures enables businesses to scale quickly and respond to changing market demands. This flexibility is critical as digital ecosystems become more complex.
- Omnichannel customer experiences: Customers today interact with brands across multiple channels, both online and offline. Businesses need to unify these experiences to provide a seamless customer journey.
Exciting technical innovations in the Optimizely One platform
With Nordic markets showing great promise for businesses in the coming year, Optimizely is doubling down on key innovations to deliver a seamless, unified platform for marketers, all while staying ahead of the tech curve. This year’s first Opticon, held in Stockholm—home of the original Episerver—also brought a much-welcomed focus on Commerce Connect.
Content Management
With the release of SaaS CMS in July, Optimizely have strengthened their competition with platforms like Contentful. While this release is still limited in its technical scope, it offers a modern architecture coupled with head hosting platforms like Vercel and a new content-based pricing model. It also comes with a brand-new Visual Builder modernizing the development of page templates and components.
Within the PaaS space it was announced that the new Visual Builder for SaaS will come with CMS 13 in Q2 of 2025 bringing all the benefits of modern component driven layout. While this will require investment from clients there will hopefully be some migration tooling provided as well as migration paths offered by Niteco to help support client migration to Visual Builder.
Commerce Connect
There have been a few features that we’ve been excitingly waiting for in the commerce space:
- Support for Commerce indexing in Graph on Products, Variant and basic price data
- AI driven properties for Product and Variants
- New SaaS payment gateway that decouples payment providers from implementation
- New SaaS promotions gateway in private beta soon to come for open beta and release in 2025
Although Google Search and Recommendations has not been released yet it’s still on the roadmap and we’re hopefully for something 2025 but it’s great to see Optimizely’s renewed investment in Commerce following Opticon 2024’s limited showcase.
Experimentation
Within the experimentation space AI and Edge were heavy on the roadmap with several exciting new core features:
AI driven test recommendations which use your data gathered from tests to recommend variations that may see a benefit within your experiments.
Edge test running. This feature sees an agent at the Cloudflare edge with the ability to interact with the Web Ex API for testing dynamically service modified pages based on tests. This will allow pages to be loaded with DOM changes and reduce flicker and layout shift those impacts Core Web Vitals.
Finished and left live experiments. We can now finish experiments so they don’t impact other metrics and even leave them live until the product team can implement changes
New AI versions of the multi armed bandit tests designed to take the benefits of statistical significance tests and multi arm and roll them in to one
>>> Read more: Why is experimentation important in business? Here are top 3 cases
Personalization
One of the biggest announcements was a new edge personalization platform that works like web experimentation but is used to implement personalization on a 1 to 1 basis. It builds on the fundaments of web experimentation to deliver personalization on any platform and will also benefit from the Edge test running features.
Graph
Along with the improvements mentioned within Graph for Commerce, new schema structures already in SaaS are coming to CMS 13 along with many new features such as language fallback features.
While not expected to directly compete with some features in Search & Navigation Graph’s architectural changes, performance and AI cognitive search features make it the de facto choice now in the Optimizely search space when not using an enterprise search platform.
Partner with the best: Niteco’s expertise in Optimizely and beyond
Opticon 2024 Stockholm has showcased a bright future for digital innovation, highlighted by groundbreaking advancements in technology in the context of excessive business opportunities in the Nordic market. When it comes to digital transformation, you need more than just a vendor - you need a trusted partner who can guide you every step of the way.
With over 14 years of experience and 2000+ successful Optimizely projects under our belt, Niteco is uniquely positioned to help your business succeed. From AI-driven personalization to cutting-edge Ecommerce solutions, our team of experts is here to deliver the strategies and technical expertise that will set your business apart. Don’t wait - partner with Niteco to turn insights from Opticon into real, actionable strategies for 2025 success.
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