Opticon25 New York: Marketing’s AI Milestone
Last week, the Javits Center in New York hosted Opticon25, Optimizely’s largest and most significant event to date. Thousands of marketers, digital leaders and partners gathered to explore the future of customer experience in an era shaped by AI, experimentation and personalization.
AI, experimentation and customer-first innovation
Optimizely's CEO Alex Atzberger provided the vision, announcing a significant redesign of their AI offering Opal. Billed as the first true AI agent orchestration platform for marketing. Far beyond a simple AI assistant, Opal enables marketers to design their own agents and tapping into a growing directory of pre-built agents, including Niteco's award winning experimentation agent, 'Sample Size Genie'. Marketers can build workflows through a no-code visual interface and integrate seamlessly with tools like GA4. The keynote reminded us that technology only matters if humans can adopt it: “Put customer-first, not AI”.
Optimizely’s President, Shafqat Islam, captured the pace of change perfectly: "the marketing world has shifted more in the past year than in the last decade".
They outlined three pillars driving the transformation:
- AI beyond the hype – making AI the infrastructure of modern marketing.
- GEO and visibility – creating content that adapts to context, location and behavior.
- Analytics that drive action – turning data into immediate, informed decisions.
Customer stories and partner impact
The event wasn’t just about technology launches. We heard inspiring customer stories from brands including Capital One, A Place for Mom, Grammarly, and Cox Automotive. Each demonstrating how experimentation, content and personalization deliver meaningful outcomes. Partners were treated to an inspiring pre-event keynote from Rishad Tobaccowala. He challenged everyone to embrace change and lead forward together.
Optimizely also spotlighted the critical role of partners, with deep dives on Optimizely One, Opal, analytics, SaaS CMS and even Sitecore migration strategies. Collaboration was a clear theme: this ecosystem is where innovation becomes execution.
Niteco’s perspective
Niteco came to Opticon25 with a clear focus: how do we help our customers get practical with these AI breakthroughs?
We showcased why we’re recognized as the #1 Optimizely Partner for the AI era.
Firstly, Niteco was named Grand Prize Winner of Optimizely’s Opal Tools Hackathon with our innovation, the Sample Size Genie. We fought off stiff competition from the Optimizely global partner network to win the prestigious award.
Built as part of Optimizely’s Opal AI, our agent tackles one of the biggest challenges for experimentation teams: calculating sample sizes, baselines, and test durations. Our Opal AI Agent transforms that process making planning faster, easier, and more accessible. The Optimizely judges called it a "game-changer".
As a proud sponsor of Opticon, we offered attending brands an exclusive opportunity to cut through the AI hype with a Free AI Audit & Adoption Roadmap. The interest was overwhelming, and our valuable give-away was quickly sold out. We're bringing the same offer to Europe, for Opticon25, London.
Built on our proven Audit → Adopt → Accelerate framework, the roadmap gives leaders a board-ready plan complete with business case, budget, and timelines. By focusing on governance, compliance, and measurable outcomes, we are helping the lucky participants move beyond theory to walk away from Opticon with a clear, actionable strategy to unlock productivity, performance, and growth with Opal AI.
Niteco’s event takeaway's
We see Opal not just as a tool, but as a catalyst for how Optimizely customers can accelerate growth, improve efficiency and create more meaningful customer experiences.
Key learnings from the event were:
- Enable experimentation at scale by embedding AI-driven workflows in customer experience strategies.
- Bridge human and machine by helping marketing teams adopt new AI capabilities without losing sight of their customers.
- Navigate the shifting web by leveraging crawler insights and generative engine optimization (GEO) to understand changing user search behavior and surface the right information at the right place.
- Drive measurable outcomes by linking content, personalization and analytics to business KPIs.
Looking ahead: Opticon London
Opticon25 New York set a new standard for what an industry event can achieve – a milestone moment for AI in marketing. But the journey doesn’t stop here. On Tuesday 30 September, Opticon comes to London. We’ll be there to continue the conversation, share insights with our clients, and explore how European businesses can make AI real in their digital strategies.
And we'll be offering the first lucky 30 brands our Free AI Audit & Adoption Roadmap (worth over £10,000). You can register your interest ahead of the event below.
We look forward to seeing you there.