https://symposium.sitecore.com/en/agenda?tab.day=20241016#/

These are my notes from the first day of Sitecore Symposium 2024.

The power to build for measurable impact

During the kick-off session Sitecore reps spoke about continuing the product’s commitment to have an on-prem presence. They want to make big changes when the customer is ready. Sitecore is learning from the past when pushing clients to the cloud or to Kubernetes was scaring some clients.

The presentation focused on Sitecore Stream. A new approach to brand management. A stream AI first approach. This may be a new look for their acquisition of STYLELABS in 2018 and an opportunity to create synergies with their disparate products.

AI Brand Assist will manage content and assets within your brand, helping guide content creators to the right look and feel for your company.

What is brand-aware AI? AI that sits over other platforms, makes brand kits and insures proper branding for published content. This technology uses Azure AI or allows clients to bring their own AI.

American Airlines

Some interesting points from the presentation with American Airlines is that they built an aviation library that pilots can access during flights and surveys at the gate allowed them to improve technology by showing videos on how to stow your bags.

Johnson Controls

Johnson controls moved to SXA and found that organizing all of their sites using the same consistent technology allowed marketers to move through departments and still have the same familiar tools to work with.

Ledecky is mesmerizing

A phenomenal swimmer doesn’t make you great at keynote speaking. But somehow Katie Ledecky thrives at both. The audience was mesmerized by her. Some key takeaways from her conversation:

• Mentorship is very important as she moves into the role of being a mentor
• Setting goals daily, weekly, yearly 
• “Take the lead; keep the lead” is her mantra, given to her by her grandfather
• “I set goals that scare me”

Power to build community

I got a lot out of this presentation where they discussed the future state of XM Cloud migrations is AI. Migration projects come in all shapes and sizes Since XM Cloud sits in the cloud it has its own dilemmas. The presentation used Figma and the JSS Copilot tool from Vercel to create components for Sitecore XM Cloud, helping migration.

https://jss-copilot.vercel.app

The tool can generate scripts for migration. Manipulating prompts in AI allows for formats like JSON to be returned properly. Vercel has an AI SDK that can be used. AI uses tokens to determine pricing so choosing the right AI is crucial to the finance of a project.

My thought during this presentation was to try using this tool to generate YAML files in the structure needed for IAR, to be serialized into XM Cloud as content. I have a few migration projects coming up and want to try this. I don’t know how feasible it is to create components from Figma but I do think it is feasible to create IAR files for pages with existing components that include your migrated content.

They also talked about a genesis tool used to convert existing code into GraphQL queries to help migration.

Sitecore Search and Discover product roadmap and strategic innovations

My key takeaways from this session were:

• If you send an IP with a search request it can boost geo spatial results
• The team is working on Sitecore publish pushing content into indexes
• The team is making small updates to UI rather than big releases
• The team wants to hear feedback and meets with five clients per quarter (I know this is true because I contacted the product owner through Slack and email with quick replies; I also spoke to him after the session.)

On to day two …