In an era where every marketing leader is under pressure to deliver more with less, Optimizely Inc. is accelerating its shift into the AI-driven marketing future.

Optimizely positions itself as a global digital experience platform powering content creation, testing, publishing and analytics for brands such as Starbucks Corp. and Nike Inc. Its most significant transformation to date is rooted in its AI strategy, with every stage of the marketing lifecycle — from ideation to optimization — now supported by its agentic AI platform, Opal.

“We help power marketing solutions across content,” said Shafqat Islam (pictured), president of Optimizely. “We help [organizations] create and publish great content, measure and optimize that content, run tests and run analytics on that … so, the entire marketing lifecycle. Now, everything we do across that marketing lifecycle is powered by AI. We recently launched an agentic AI platform to help marketers transform both the way they work, but also the results and the business outcomes they drive.”

Islam spoke with John Furrier for the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action Series on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI-driven marketing, deep contextual understanding and a powerful partnership with Google Cloud are reshaping digital experience workflows — and unlocking new levels of scale, efficiency and creativity for marketing teams. (* Disclosure below.)

A new era with AI-driven marketing

Crucially, that AI mandate is coming straight from the top. CEOs, CMOs and boards are now mandating AI-first operations, telling teams they can’t increase headcount unless they’ve proven the work can’t be executed by agents. This sweeping shift is driving a surge of enterprise adoption — but it’s also creating noise and confusion. Optimizely’s mission is to help organizations leap from AI experiments to true production-scale impact.

“We do see there’s a lot of market pull,” Islam said. “There’s also a lot of noise in the market on what’s truly AI and what’s truly agentic. Our goal is to help marketers get over that hump from experimental proof of concepts, just tests that they’re doing with AI, to real production-ready, enterprise-ready use cases that are driving business value.”

Generative AI without context produces “AI slop”— content that looks fine in demos but falls apart in real-world use. True quality requires rich company-specific context: brand voice, personas, product details, differentiators and internal best practices, Islam added. This is why Optimizely emphasizes context engineering, a discipline focused on delivering the right context in the right amount to the model. Too much context overwhelms the system; too little results in generic output.

“We believe [Google] Gemini is the best product out there, and we’ve kind of bet our business on top of Gemini,” Islam said. “But no matter what tooling you use or what LLM you use, the main thing is you need to be able to add the context to get the outcomes you want. We believe Gemini provides so much flexibility and … technical advancement around how you can provide context. One other thing that I just want to point out to marketing leaders is also having AI in the context of where your users are working — so in the workflow. We believe that also drives massive levels of adoption.”

Advancing the AI stack with Gemini

After assessing the large language model landscape, Optimizely selected Gemini as its foundational model for several reasons, including its multimodal intelligence across text, image and video. It also benefits from flexible model selection across the Flash, Pro and Thinking tiers, according to Islam.

“Gemini has very large context windows, like a million-plus tokens,” he said. “Then we serve the enterprise with data privacy, security and governance. These things are very important. For us, those are kind of some of the technical reasons why we chose Gemini.”

The partnership goes deeper than model performance. Through A2A (agent-to-agent) interoperability — now open-sourced via the Linux Foundation — Optimizely ensures its agents can communicate with Google agents and any third-party agents across the MarTech ecosystem. This composability unlocks entirely new use cases in AI-driven marketing, Islam added.

“For us, it’s not just about interoperability,” he said. “It also unlocks a lot of different use cases. Just think, the MarTech stack is complex, it’s sprawling. There are a lot of tools out there, a lot of products that have agents. Open source allows us to combine the best of what Opal does within our product portfolio and then tie it with other products that may exist out there, other agents that may exist out there. It really unlocks new types of value for our customers.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action Series:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action Series. Neither Google Cloud, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE