Opticon 2026 and the Optimizely OMVP Summit: agentic futures, upgrade paths and growth

Opticon London took over the Barbican on 13 October. The day before, the Optimizely MVP (OMVP) summit gave a small group of us from Mando Group a closer look at some imminent roadmap arrivals, and at some strong positioning from Optimizely on where it is going next.

As you would expect, agentic futures was the single theme running through every session I attended. Here is a quick take on what stood out.

01

From agents to virtual teammates

Last year’s agents have grown up. Front and centre in London, following their launch in New York in August, were Optimizely’s Virtual Teammates: persistent, role-based AI coworkers that retain organisational context, run on schedules or event triggers, and start work without waiting for a prompt. The launch roster now covers seven roles (up from 5 in NY). Each has its own identity, permissions and audit trail, with people deciding where human review sits.

Seeing functioning bots create, interact and monitor without pause was compelling, as bundled options teams can hire from a directory and tailor in plain language. Alongside them, Opal is becoming Mark: the agent platform.

02

A step up for stacks that have fallen behind

Good real estate was given to upgrades. Many organisations are not that far behind, but face a cumbersome path to the latest version. Optimizely’s message is that CMS 13 and Commerce 15 stay on the same fundamental technology as their predecessors, now on .NET 10. That makes the jump smaller than the CMS 11 to 12 move from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

It matters because CMS 13 is the gateway to the agentic tooling: Visual Builder, Optimizely Graph and the deepest set of agent tools for content and SEO/GEO. For clients on CMS 12, the case for upgrading is now as much about AI readiness as support timelines. Upgrade schedules will be governed by Appetite for AI rather than the need to avoid out of support versions, a shift from stick to carrot.

Upgrade schedules will be governed by appetite for AI rather than the need to avoid out of support versions.

03

AI as a tool for growth

Society at every level is grappling with the context that comes with AI adoption. So it was good to see content encouraging AI as a tool for growth, for professionals and for businesses. CEO Alex Atzberger was very clear on what is and isn’t a growth strategy:

The argument is that agents absorb operational work so marketers spend more time on creative and strategic activity. Customer stories backed this up.

04

Beyond the Optimizely stack, with a compounding effect

The agentic tooling is being rapidly elevated so it no longer depends on Optimizely’s marketing tooling at CMS, CMP or Commerce level. The Agent Platform now connects to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, HubSpot, GA4, Adobe Analytics and Figma, supports remote MCP servers, and surfaces in Slack and Microsoft Copilot.

Yet there is a clear compounding element. The more data that can be integrated, and the more platforms included, the more utility the agents deliver. Teammates retain context from past projects and decisions, Graph brings CMS and Commerce content into retrieval, and Mark-IQ grounds actions in organisational data. Optimizely’s research found:

The richest context wins.

05

Early promise, but some real momentum

Several things we saw are announced but not yet in the wild: the Mark marketing models are “coming soon”, WebMCP and autonomous personalisation were previews, and Virtual Teammates are still rolling out. Realistically, some of it won’t land until next year. For some the readiness gap is real: data foundations, taxonomy and process need to be in place before autonomy pays off.

However, the excitement was real, and so were the energy and the trajectory. For our clients the next steps are practical:

If you’d like to talk through what that looks like for your estate, get in touch.