AI = over 40% more productivity: How we use AI at Optimizely

AI has, understandably, taken the market by storm and, as a leader in the AI space, Optimizely is innovating as fast as any. In the past few months alone, Opal—Optimizely's AI platform—has undergone transformative upgrades that add a slew of new features to the marketer’s toolkit and enable a truly infinite workforce.

Testers to our core, we’ve not only been developing these innovations, but testing them too—thanks to our very own marketing organization and select customers.

And the results and learnings? We just had to share.

Hint: Some seriously dramatic shifts in productivity, creativity, and performance.

3 (very strategic) AI capabilities that drive REAL results

1. AI-assisted content creation

   
   Optimizely Opal now intuitively understands your brand voice and leverages your historical wins to rapidly generate campaign themes, craft precision-targeted briefs, and automate task creation - all while maintaining your unique brand identity.
   

   Key capabilities:

   ✅ On-brand content generation and responses: Enrich Optimizely Opal’s responses with your unique brand context, tone, and persona to maintain consistent messaging while scaling your creative output.

   ✅ Integration with Google Search: Prompt Optimizely Opal to instantly create campaigns, tasks, or experiments with built-in Google Search for real-time research and context.

   ✅ AI campaign kits: Instantly generate everything needed for the end-to-end creation of a campaign, including a strategic brief, on-brand assets, tasks, and promotional content.

   ✅ Industry and marketing researcher agents: Spin up content tailored to specific industries or topics with dedicated agents trained on research and vertical-specific nuance.

   ✅ Video transcription agent: Instantly transcribe video content into text or subtitles—just drop a file in Optimizely Opal Chat and get polished, shareable transcripts in seconds.

   ✅ Multilingual AI translations in CMS: Translate content into multiple languages while preserving meaning, tone, and formatting across CMS experiences.

   ✅ Consistent chat across Optimizely's products: Access Optimizely Opal directly within your workflow, eliminating context switching and accelerating content development with contextual suggestions.

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   Hear more about our Industry marketer agent, ready to help you with industry-specific messaging that resonates with your target audience.

2. Experimentation accelerator

   
   Not only has AI helped improve content output in this beta, it has also enhanced the optimization of that content. Optimizely Opal now delivers one-click experiment summaries and interpretations and generates strategic testing recommendations to deliver faster insights.
   

   Key capabilities:

   ✅ AI results summarizer: Generate a clear summary of experiment results and suggested next steps—all in a single click.

   ✅ Strategic experiment advisor and plan agents: Create full experiment ideas and plans with hypotheses, key metrics, and estimated run times—guided by Optimizely’s rapid experimentation expertise.

   ✅ Variation generator and summarizer: Quickly create and understand test variations with natural language summaries that explain changes without manually reviewing each variation.

   ✅ Consistent chat: Access Opal Chat directly within Web and Feature Experimentation, getting real-time answers about best practices, how-to questions, and ideation support.

3. Improved content performance

   
   Finally, Optimizely Opal hasn’t just helped our beta users create content and experiments faster—it’s helped users create them better.
   
   By learning from past campaign wins and real-time performance data, Optimizely Opal generates messaging, assets and experiments that are more relevant, targeted, and effective, resulting in smarter content and higher quality experiments that drive stronger engagement, improved outcomes, and better business impact from the start.
   

   Key capabilities:

   ✅ SEO and live web research tools: Use AI-powered tools to surface relevant keywords, analyze competitors, and optimize content in real time.

   ✅ Site analysis and image recognition: Simply provide a URL or upload an image, and Optimizely Opal will capture a screenshot, extract the HTML, and deliver insights. Get content suggestions, improvement ideas, experiment recommendations, and even answers to site-specific questions—all from one prompt.

   ✅ AI suggested segments: Revolutionize how you create and manage real-time segments through Optimizely Opal’s recommendations.

   ✅ Pre-built instruction agents: Purpose-built agents curated with specific instructions and tools to produce your desired outputs.

Adoption and use: We took the plunge... so you don't have to

As marketing and digital experts working for a marketing and digital experience platform, it would be unjust if we didn't try out Optimizely's new AI capabilities ourselves. Yep, we did indeed guinea pig our entire company, and some lucky customers.

With uptake nearly as rapid as the releases, and multiple user types across all features, the numbers tell a compelling story of rapid integration and measurable impact.

Here are the user profiles that participated in these impressive results:

• Senior Leadership/Executives
• Product Marketing Team
• Customer Success
• Content Marketing
• Digital Marketing
• Field Marketing
• Brand & Creative Teams
• Events Teams

And the results? Let the feature usage numbers since March 2025 speak for themselves:

• 1,500+ Optimizely Opal Chat sessions per month for 150+ active users
• 1500+ test ideas generated
• 550+ CMP tasks created
• 200+ CMP campaigns brought to life
• 190+ articles crafted
• 1,200+ experiment summaries generated
• 170+ variations brainstormed using Optimizely Opal

Optimizely Opal in action: Use cases, testimonials, and winning results

We want to help you move from AI hype to habit. The following are some of the real use cases and impacts from beta practitioners and product data.

AI-assisted content creation

Marketing teams now leverage Optimizely Opal to streamline the entire campaign development lifecycle—from initial research through execution planning. The system intelligently generates campaign themes, drafts briefs within brand parameters, and creates task assignments, requiring only strategic oversight and refinement from your marketing team.

Specific use cases for content creation:

• Generate campaign themes
• Draft campaign briefs with brand guidelines applied
• Create and assign tasks for campaign execution
• Auto-generate social posts (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
• Design workflows using agent-driven task and campaign creation
• Upload video content for instant transcription or subtitles
• Use the Marketing Research Agent for deep topic exploration and campaign suggestions
• Create content for multiple industries using the Industry Marketer Agent
• Auto-generate image assets and variations
• Tailor output based on uploaded brand guidelines or tone of voice
• Customize agent instructions in Optimizely Opal Settings
• Offload repetitive tasks and jumpstart content creation with smart, context-aware suggestions

"With Opal, I have more time to get creative and feel super efficient—I'm hitting 2-3x my content creation target per week, without compromising on the quality of my content." - Leah, Content Marketing Manager, Optimizely

🗒️ TL;DR: Tasks get completed faster, marketers no longer have to ideate asset by asset, contextual reuse of existing content streamlines workflows, and smart suggestions—like relevant data points and customer testimonials—add depth with minimal effort.

Optimizely Opal acts as a force multiplier for your team, cumulatively delivering a ~30% increase in marketing output across the entire campaign lifecycle.

Experimentation accelerator

Optimizely Opal now serves as an experimentation co-pilot for your Experimentation teams, dramatically accelerating test creation, implementation, and analysis. The system generates sophisticated test hypotheses based on historical data patterns, crafts test specifications, and delivers instant summaries of complex results—transforming how teams approach their testing roadmaps.

Specific use cases for experimentation:

• Create comprehensive test plans with hypotheses, metrics, and run-time estimates
• Summarize experiment results instantly
• Identify optimal audience segments for targeting
• Generate variations and variation descriptions
• Recommend next experiments based on current results
• Access Optimizely's experimentation best practices through Opal chat

Measurable impact:

• 5.72% of tests created with AI

• 66.55% of results summarized with AI

🗒️ TL;DR: These aren't just isolated boosts - they compound across the testing lifecycle. More tests created with AI means more tests are getting run that the marketing team wouldn’t have had time to create. More tests being summarized means the sometimes lengthy process to interpret results can now be recouped and reinvested into running more experiments.

Optimizely Opal is accelerating workflows that would have otherwise stalled or been deprioritized due to lack of time, enabling teams to run more tests, learn faster, and focus their time on strategic iteration.

Improved content performance

Optimizely Opal doesn’t just accelerate production – it helps you create content and experiments that drive greater impact. By analyzing past campaign successes and leveraging real-time performance data, Optimizely Opal generates messaging, assets, and experiment designs that are not only quicker to execute but also more relevant, targeted, and effective, resulting in smarter content and higher-quality experiments that lead to better engagement, stronger outcomes, and more meaningful business impact.

Specific use cases:

• Analyze websites and images for improvement recommendations
• Enhance content relevance
• Create more precise audience targeting
• Maintain brand consistency across the board

"Optimizely Opal has become an indispensable tool for our product marketing team. Its sophisticated capabilities have significantly streamlined our workflows, allowing us to analyze complex technical documents with ease and generate high-quality content in a fraction of the time.

"Its ability to conduct deep persona research have also been invaluable, providing us with deeper insights into our target audience and enabling us to craft more effective marketing strategies. Optimizely Opal has truly transformed the way we work, boosting our efficiency and improving the overall impact of our marketing efforts." - Anthony, VP Customer & Product Marketing, Optimizely

🗒️ TL;DR: Like other AI enablers, these use cases are complimentary. Better content performance means increased customer facing outcomes from the content. More variations means better tests, which in turn create more optimized content and experiences. And it’s not just scattershot—most of the content that is getting produced by Opal (50-60%) is getting utilized by the marketers asking for it.

The bottom line: How much time was saved and how much revenue was generated?

Benchmarks can sometimes feel abstract, and use cases too specific. What does usage like we’ve described and benchmarks that we’ve found mean for your bottom line? Here’s how we think about the value of AI within our own organization.

✏️ AI-assisted content creation: The data behind it

When we talk about using AI to improve content creation and output, what we mean, fundamentally, is that you can do more with less. The value of doing more with less is either decreased labor costs and headcount or, more likely, increased quantity of revenue-generating output.

🏎️ Experimentation acceleration: The data behind it

When talking about experimentation, the primary value of AI is driving up the velocity of tests run. Anyone that has experience with experimentation knows that the ROI calculation for it is simple: Velocity x Scope x Efficacy. If you increase the velocity, you increase the value.

📈 Improved content performance: The data behind it

The value of AI isn’t just producing more—more content, more labor, more experiments—it also helped the beta users produce better content. Optimizely Opal recommends what content to create and who to create it for, improving performance and optimization across multiple vectors.

Optimizely Opal best practices and recommendations

Like all tools, though, better usage results in better outcomes. We’ve already begun to identify practices that have maximized AI impact among beta users.

The fundamental difference between basic AI use and transformative implementation often comes down to how effectively you guide the system. Our most successful adopters have developed specific methodologies that dramatically enhance results when working with Optimizely Opal:

1. Strategic prompt engineering

   Strong prompts = strong results. Focus on atomic tasks (one ask at a time) rather than piling on multiple goals. AI responds best to linear and iterative instruction. Build step by step, and you’ll get sharper, more useful outputs every time. Find the sweet spot between overly vague requests and excessively constraining instructions.
   
   

2. Customize and govern your AI

   
   Leverage custom instructions to shape how Optimizely Opal works for your team. Whether it's defining how to create a test plan or aligning outputs with internal processes, these settings help standardize results and reinforce best practices. Our most effective users, for instance, tag instructions explicitly (eg. @Industrialize) and link to internal docs when relevant. Optimizely Opal will follow your lead.
   
   

3. Iterative feedback loops

   
   The more context you provide, the more valuable the AI becomes. Feed Optimizely Opal with relevant inputs: customer personas, product catalogs, performance data, or past experiments. This grounding helps generate ideas and outputs that align with your brand, your goals, and your audience. Don’t treat AI as a generic assistant—treat it like a new team member getting onboarded with the information it needs to succeed.
   
   

4. Systemize for scale

   
   AI isn’t a shortcut, and it alone won’t exponentially boost efficiency - it needs structure to thrive. Without intentional leadership, it can often invite more complexity into existing systems. Teams that see the greatest impact have solid systems in place: people, processes, platforms, and prompts. Think of it as a content supply chain: assign ownership, align workflows, and orchestrate across your stack to unlock AI’s full potential.

What's coming next?

This is just the beginning of Optimizely's AI evolution. Our strategic roadmap includes:

• Specialized agents: Create or customize agents that are able to perform advanced actions as well as be included in agent workflows.
• Agent workflows: Combine multiple specialized agents to work together to coordinate outcomes.
• So much more: Keep your eyes and ears peeled, folks.

The future of marketing isn't just being augmented by AI - it's being reimagined. And with Optimizely Opal, you're not just keeping pace, you're leading the transformation.

Go beyond just an AI chatbot or assistant—get an entire and infinite workforce with Optimizely Opal.