Working smarter with AI: How Optimizely Opal is redefining marketing execution

Everyone's talking about AI-generated content. But no one is really talking about who's left holding the bag when it's time to execute.

Senior marketers are facing intense pressure to scale output, enter new markets, and demonstrate faster ROI - all with leaner teams and tighter budgets. Generative AI tools have helped jumpstart content creation: blog drafts, social captions, email subject lines, but they rarely solve the harder part: executing full, brand-aligned campaigns.

That’s the disconnect. Sure, AI can create content, but it doesn’t understand your brand, your goals, your systems, or your customer journeys. It doesn’t know if the content it generated aligns with your tone of voice or drives pipeline.

So marketers are left stitching together content, workflows, and data - briefing, tagging, uploading, testing, analyzing - across a fractured tool stack. That’s not working smarter. It’s just working harder.

We built Optimizely Opal to change that.  

"I have this belief that we are building the most advanced AI system, AI platform for marketers or experimentation teams or digital teams" Shafqat Islam, President, Optimizely

This is your infinitely scalable specialist: always at your fingertips, always bringing expertise, and always specific to your brand.

Why most AI stops short of execution

The generative AI boom brought a wave of tools that can produce content at scale - but marketing isn’t just about content. It also includes:

• Coordinating campaigns across regions and channels

• Aligning stakeholders and securing legal/compliance approvals

• Uploading and tagging assets in your CMS, DAM, and Content Marketing Platform (CMP) (or worse, digging through spreadsheets, files, Teams messages... you get the drill)

• Testing variations, tracking performance, and optimizing campaign performance

• Proving ROI across the content lifecycle

That’s where most AI tools fall short. Where others bolt AI onto a prompt field or stop at a content assistant, Optimizely Opal builds AI into the entire lifecycle; from brief to publish, test to optimize.

For CMOs and VPs, this means AI feels like a missed opportunity. The expectations are high, but the outcomes often don’t materialize. To make AI work at scale, we need systems that understand not just language—but context, goals, and workflows.

What makes this different: Execution-ready AI for marketing

Optimizely Opal is not another content assistant. It’s built around five core pillars that solve for real marketing pain points:

1. Context engineering: The foundation of execution

Marketers don’t operate in a vacuum - and neither should AI.

“Context is king in AI. The most important attribute for good AI output is not prompt quality—it’s how thoughtfully we engineer the context.” Imran Yousuf, VP Software Engineering, Optimizely

Optimizely Opal uses context engineering to give AI the complete picture: your tone, guidelines, campaign history, performance data, audience segments, and goals. Instead of relying on a prompt, Opal builds a structured context package before it generates anything.

Analogy: Most AI tools give the model a one-pager before an exam. Optimizely Opal gives it the full textbook.

This ensures outputs are not just high quality, but high fidelity to your brand. For marketing leaders, that means no more rewriting drafts, re-explaining tone, or wondering if AI “gets it.”

And because Opal is embedded into your workflows, it always has access to live systems and current goals. No copy-paste. No lagging context. No retraining.

💡“There’s no one on your marketing team who’s read every blog post, every product brief, every support doc. But Opal has.” — Shafqat Islam

2. Intention recognition: execution at scale

Optimizely Opal includes intelligent AI agents—purpose-built assistants that help your team get real work done.

Instead of switching between tools or retyping instructions, marketers simply tell Opal what they need: “Create a campaign brief for our Opticon launch.” “Summarize this experiment’s results.” “Draft a content plan for EMEA.”

This recognizes intent and activates the right agents—whether that’s:

• Generating content briefs

• Planning personalization experiments

• Reviewing campaign performance

• Recommending and developing tests

No dropdowns. No new UI to learn. Just intelligent, responsive support for your team.

As a CMO, I love what this means for my marketing team—fewer bottlenecks, faster cycle times, and less reliance on multiple point solutions.

3. Tools: Let AI do real work

Most AI just talks. Optimizely Opal acts.

Optimizely Opal has access to a suite of tools—capabilities that let it take real action inside your systems. Think of tools as APIs for AI. With tools, Opal can:

• Search your DAM for campaign assets

• Retrieve content from your DAM

• Check competitor mentions via web search

• Analyze past campaign engagement

• Write to your calendar or launch an A/B test

And through SDKs, your teams or partners can create tools for agents to leverage that are specific to your use cases.

This turns AI from a novelty into a true team extension, capable of doing work, not just talking about it.

4. Autonomous agents: Always-on execution

“We built Opal to behave like a teammate who starts work before you log in and finishes after you sign off.” Imran Yousuf, VP Engineering, Optimizely

Opal doesn’t wait for your team to press “go.” It can operate autonomously, triggered by events, schedules, or thresholds.

For example:

• Instantly analyze live web pages to suggest SEO improvements, opportunities for experiments and data driven ideas for maximizing content performance
• Create industry specific content and campaigns via Industry Marketer agents
• Create first pass translations instantly with Opal AI, helping you go global - fast 

This kind of background intelligence means fewer missed opportunities, fewer manual handoffs, and more proactive, AI-driven execution.

5. Evaluation and grounding: Quality you can trust

AI hallucination is real, and brand damage is expensive.

Opal can act as an intern reviewer, scoring outputs against brand guidelines, checking factual accuracy via grounding sources, and feeding results back into the system for improvement.

This closes the loop between generation and judgment, ensuring outputs are not just fast, but right.

For leaders, that means greater confidence and control - without slowing teams down.

“AI is confident—even when it’s wrong. That’s why grounding and evaluation agents are essential for brand-safe execution.” Imran Yousuf, VP Engineering, Optimizely

How Opal differs from other AI tools on the market today

“Without deep integration, you end up with what we call swivel-chair AI—copying between tabs, retraining tools that never learn.” Shafqat Islam, President, Optimizely.

Natively embedded across Optimizely's product suite, it works across the entire content lifecycle. No more juggling logins, re-entering data, or syncing across silos.

With unified context and execution in one place, Optimizely Opal can:

• Generate content from within briefs

• Pull assets directly from your DAM

• Help you run more impactful tests

• Optimize based on real analytics

This is what eliminates “swivel-chair AI”, and makes Opal a truly enterprise-grade system for marketing execution.

The result: Smarter marketing, not just faster content

When Optimizely Opal powers your execution, the benefits are exponential:

• Faster time to market with fewer bottlenecks and blockers

• Consistent brand execution across geos, channels, and teams

• Scalable strategy - without needing to scale headcount

• Increase productivity from existing teams, focused on higher-order work

• Clearer ROI through connected workflows and measurable results

For marketing leaders under pressure to do more, prove more, and move faster, Opal is the system that closes the gap between strategy and execution.

Conclusion: From generative to agentic AI

We’ve officially entered the age of agentic AI - a shift as significant for marketing as the rise of digital itself. The future isn’t about clever copy or faster content creation. It’s about building intelligent systems that execute your strategy, protect your brand, and scale your impact.

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about elevating them. When AI takes care of the rote and repeatable, your teams can do the work only humans can: big ideas, bold campaigns, meaningful differentiation.

Imagine if every marketer had five virtual teammates—ones who worked 24/7, never missed a deadline, and knew your brand inside and out? That’s what agentic AI unlocks. An infinite workforce of AI specialists, brand and context aware, powered by hundreds of tools to perform any function.

Optimizely Opal doesn’t just assist. It executes. Thoughtfully, autonomously, and always in line with your goals.

The smartest marketing teams won’t be the ones who generate faster—they’ll be the ones who execute better.

👉 Ready to scale your marketing execution with Optimizely Opal? Discover more about Optimizely AI.