Current State of Digital Experience Platform AI Today: What Sitecore Stream Can Do for Marketers
Jun 02, 2025 • 8 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Chief Technology Officer
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How Sitecore and Gradial Use Agentic AI to Accelerate Marketing Execution
Oct 27, 2025 • 4 Minute Read • Tod Szewczyk, VP, Marketing Services
I once sat in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra hall watching the French Composer and Conductor Pierre Boulez rehearse Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. He dismantled and reassembled the score—strings with woodwinds, brass with percussion—until what began as chaos became pure precision. It was mesmerizing.
Marketing today is in a similar moment. In this new Agentic Age, AI isn't composing new ideas; it's learning to conduct them.
Agentic AI refers to a new class of AI applications that don't just sit around waiting to be prompted. These agents combine large language models (LLMs) with real business context and tools that can autonomously make decisions, take steps, and follow through.
Partnerships like Sitecore and Gradial are bringing this shift to life, adding AI marketing agents and doing what Boulez did that day—turning complex, fragmented efforts into harmony, speed, and cohesion.
Marketers have never had more data, tools, or channels at their disposal. Yet for many organizations, the real challenge isn't generating ideas; it's turning those ideas into market-ready campaigns fast enough to keep up with shifting customer expectations. The execution layer—where strategies and briefs are translated into live experiences—has become one of the biggest bottlenecks.
What Gradial Adds to Sitecore's AI Roadmap
Sitecore's newly announced partnership with Gradial, an AI-powered orchestration platform, is positioned to address these bottlenecks within marketing workflows. Instead of marketers manually moving briefs through teams, tools, and approvals, Gradial uses AI to automate much of the execution. The goal is to transform strategy into action without the lag of endless handoffs.
Think of Gradial as the conductor standing before a complex marketing orchestra. Each platform, channel, and dataset plays a part, but it's the AI that ensures they move in time, with every move contributing to a unified customer experience.
For Sitecore customers already working with its composable digital experience platform (DXP), this means AI can act as the connective tissue across systems, helping launch personalized, omnichannel campaigns faster and with fewer operational tasks.
The Marketing Execution Bottleneck and How AI Can Fix It
Speed is the differentiator at a time when audiences are fickle, and competitors are just as fast. Time-to-market can be the difference between relevance and irrelevance.
Most marketing teams have the right tools, but are struggling to coordinate them efficiently. At the same time, tool sprawl is real. Marketing stacks are often bloated, and integrating them can be a painful process. AI-driven orchestration will bring rhythm and unity to that noise.
Resources are stretched with teams being asked to do more with fewer resources. Automating the repetitive and tactical frees humans to be more creative and strategic, allowing them to produce memorable experiences that drive action.
What Sitecore + Gradial Means for Marketing and Content Teams
Expect faster campaign delivery, but also a need for stronger governance. AI can move at speed, but only when your data, workflows, and oversight are solid.
Governance is the score that keeps the performance aligned. When your data is structured and your rules are clear, agentic AI can execute quickly and stay on track.
With AI acting as an execution agent, system integration, security, and monitoring become even more critical. From the broader perspective of technical leadership in the age of AI, one core lesson is that governance isn't a drag on innovation. When designed well, it's a velocity enabler. We've noted before that skipping AI governance often leads to bias, security gaps, or data chaos—slowing progress instead of accelerating it.
To make the most of Sitecore and Gradial, it's essential to:
- Audit and structure your data: Clean, well-organized content, customer data, and brand assets are foundational to your digital presence.
- Define lightweight but enforceable governance rules: Establish who can trigger automated actions, what guardrails apply, and how exceptions are handled.
- Identify and map automation candidates: Start with repetitive campaign tasks (setup, multichannel publishing) to get early wins.
- Ensure system readiness and monitoring: Verify that your integrations, APIs, security controls, and logging are robust so you can trust and observe what the AI agent does.
- Measure effectiveness and iterate: Track metrics to evaluate whether AI-driven execution aligns with goals, adjust rules over time, and course-correct early.
How to Prepare for Gradial and Agentic AI
Like any powerful new tool, success with Gradial will depend on:
- Data quality: Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
- Brand governance: Ensuring automation doesn't erode voice or creative nuance.
- Change management: Teams will need to adapt their approach to briefing, approving, and overseeing campaigns.
Preparation here is like a rehearsal before a performance. Teams that practice with clean data, aligned governance, and streamlined workflows will find that when the AI starts conducting, every part of the organization knows its cue.
What Gradial Means for Sitecore Stream Users
Sitecore Stream already gives marketers a robust foundation for brand-aware AI, copilots, and agentic workflows embedded throughout the Sitecore ecosystem. Sitecore Stream helps teams scale content creation, accelerate personalization, and keep campaigns aligned with brand voice and governance rules.
The new partnership with Gradial doesn't replace Stream; it extends it. Stream handles the "intelligence layer" of AI inside Sitecore products, while Gradial adds automation at the "execution layer."
Together, they create a seamless orchestration pipeline in three steps:
- From brief to live campaign: Stream supports content generation and strategy; Gradial turns that strategy into live campaigns faster, with fewer handoffs.
- Scaling personalization: Stream enables AI-driven content at scale; Gradial ensures those campaigns are deployed quickly across channels and audiences.
- Governance at speed: Stream's brand kits and oversight guardrails remain in place, ensuring Gradial's automation continues to respect tone, style, privacy, and compliance requirements.
For Sitecore customers, this combination means shorter time-to-market, less operational overhead, and the ability to compete on speed and precision.
How Sitecore and Gradial Signal the Next Wave of Agentic AI
Sitecore's partnership with Gradial is part of a larger trend: shifting from AI as a "copilot" to AI as an "agent."
For Sitecore customers and marketers, this shift could redefine how teams are structured and how quickly ideas reach the market. As a Sitecore partner, Verndale helps bridge strategy and execution, ensuring AI adoption drives measurable marketing outcomes, not just automation.
Just as Boulez transformed an ensemble of instruments into one seamless performance, Sitecore and Gradial are redefining marketing orchestration. Agentic AI is an extension of the marketing team, helping you perform at a new level of precision, speed, and harmony.
To learn more about how Gradial and Sitecore Stream can be integrated into your Sitecore ecosystem, get in touch with our Sitecore experts today.