Opticon 2023 Highlights: Optimizely Opal AI Assistant
Optimizely Opal was one of the highlights announced at Opticon 2023. Here's what you need to know about the new AI initiative for the Optimizely product family.
Optimizely Opal - AI Integration in the Optimizely Product Family
AI is on everyone's lips these days, and Optimizely early on highlighted that they have AI elements in several of their products.
So far, AI integration has been limited to individual products, and each product has used AI in different ways. For example:
- Analyzing customer behavior and generating product recommendations in Product Recommendations.
- Analyzing and automatically tagging/describing images in CMP/DAM.
- Analyzing visitor behavior in Content Recommendations, providing editors with recommendations on the type of content they should write more/less about.
- An AI-based plugin for CMS makes web editing more efficient.
- Analyzing purchasing patterns in Optimizely Data Platform, suggesting products that need more/less marketing and identifies which customers are at different stages of the loyalty curve.
At Opticon, Optimizely took a step further and announced Optimizely Opal, which will become the new AI assistant concept integrated into the product family.
It's probably more accurate to say that Opal will be a collective term for the different types of AI integrated into the products, but the AI elements will have a unified design and interface, so that for the user, it feels like the same AI assistant is used everywhere.
That's where the concrete information ends, because it's currently not clear exactly how this assistant will be implemented. Screenshots and press releases give the impression that Opal will be a kind of always-available assistant that you can ask for suggestions, improvements, and insights while planning/writing content. It is uncertain whether Opal will be available in all Optimizely products or only in, for example, CMS/CMP.
How does Optimizely Opal work?
In addition to the built-in AI features in each product, it is likely that "Opal" in assistant form will function as a chatbot/menu system based on free text or predefined prompts (similar to ChatGPT and Dall-E/Midjourney), providing users with AI-generated results. It will probably be context-sensitive, meaning it will understand and respond based on what the user is working on on the screen.
It is also reasonable to assume that an AI assistant integrated into the products to some extent can be trained on content you provide, such as website content, a customer database, or a product catalog - this would significantly increase the assistant's accuracy when it comes to facts, style, tone, and recommendations.
What AI services are behind Optimizely Opal?
Since the AI needs in a DXP product family are so diverse, from text generation to image generation to product recommendations to customer analysis, there will likely be several different AI services (e.g., ChatGPT, Dall-E, customized machine learning and algorithms) that together form the basis for what they call Optimizely Opal.
Is Optimizely Opal available now?
Both yes and no. Opal is a concept in the planning stage. Currently, Opal is just a collective term for AI usage within Optimizely, so Opal is not a specific product/service you can order at this moment.
However, as mentioned, AI is already integrated into several existing Optimizely products. So if you're interested in exploring how to work more efficiently with content, products, sales, and marketing, you should check the link at the bottom of this article to see which available products utilize AI.
Will Optimizely Opal cost extra?
The pricing model has not been disclosed yet, and it will likely vary from product to product. Some of the products (e.g., Content Recommendations, Product Recommendations, Content Marketing Platform, and Data Platform) already have AI core functionality integrated into the product you've paid for. It's possible that Optimizely may build a chatbot-like assistant on top of this, which would probably be a paid add-on but function as an integrated part of the product.
For the CMS product, there is a commercial AI assistant for editors created by a third party. It's unclear whether this will eventually also be included under the "Opal" umbrella or whether Optimizely will develop its own version for CMS.
Bonus: Partnership with the Writer Platform
Optimizely recently announced a partnership with Writer, an AI-powered platform for content composition, publishing, and workflow.
According to Optimizely's press release, the Writer integration will be available to customers on the Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and will make it easier to compose and convey consistent messages.
Learn more about Optimizely Opal and AI in the Optimizely product family:
- Optimizely products incorporating AI
- AI assistant for CMS (commercial third party plugin)
- How Optimizely Graph utilizes machine learning for semantic search/vector search
