Check out Optimizely Opal Chat for Gemini Enterprise: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/agentfinder/product/752f149c-4033-49e3-9b72-03004f0fa392/
In this segment from the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action event, Shafqat Islam, president of Optimizely, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the shift from experimental AI to production-ready agentic workflows. Islam outlines Optimizely’s evolution as a digital experience platform and details how their new AI orchestration platform, Opal, is helping marketers drive tangible business outcomes. The conversation centers on the critical role of "context engineering" – onboarding AI agents with deep business knowledge just as one would a human employee – to avoid generic outputs and ensure high-quality results. Islam explains why integrating these agents directly into existing marketing workflows is essential for adoption, eliminating the need to toggle between disparate tools.
The discussion deepens into the technical partnership with Google Cloud, with Islam explaining the decision to build on Gemini due to its multimodal capabilities, massive context windows and enterprise-grade security. He highlights the importance of agent-to-agent interoperability and the impact of the Google Cloud Marketplace in reducing friction for buyers and accelerating growth. Islam shares compelling metrics, noting a 79% increase in experimentation volume and a 54% reduction in campaign completion time for customers using Opal. The interview concludes with a look toward the future of the "infinite workforce," where agents handle execution to free up marketers for strategic creativity.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Register for Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action
Please fill out the information below. You will receive an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Shafqat Islam, Optimizely
In this segment from the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action event, Shafqat Islam, president of Optimizely, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the shift from experimental AI to production-ready agentic workflows. Islam outlines Optimizely’s evolution as a digital experience platform and details how their new AI orchestration platform, Opal, is helping marketers drive tangible business outcomes. The conversation centers on the critical role of "context engineering" – onboarding AI agents with deep business knowledge just as one would a human employee – to avoid generic outputs and ensure high-quality results. Islam explains why integrating these agents directly into existing marketing workflows is essential for adoption, eliminating the need to toggle between disparate tools.
The discussion deepens into the technical partnership with Google Cloud, with Islam explaining the decision to build on Gemini due to its multimodal capabilities, massive context windows and enterprise-grade security. He highlights the importance of agent-to-agent interoperability and the impact of the Google Cloud Marketplace in reducing friction for buyers and accelerating growth. Islam shares compelling metrics, noting a 79% increase in experimentation volume and a 54% reduction in campaign completion time for customers using Opal. The interview concludes with a look toward the future of the "infinite workforce," where agents handle execution to free up marketers for strategic creativity.
In this segment from the Google Cloud AI Agents in Action event, Shafqat Islam, president of Optimizely, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the shift from experimental AI to production-ready agentic workflows. Islam outlines Optimizely’s evolution as a digital experience platform and details how their new AI orchestration platform, Opal, is helping marketers drive tangible business outcomes. The conversation ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is Optimizely and what services do they provide?add
What recent developments have occurred in marketing practices, particularly regarding the use of AI?add
What is the importance of having an AI orchestration platform integrated into marketing workflows?add
What metrics and improvements have been observed from using Opal and AI powered by Gemini in product testing and marketing campaigns?add
>> Hello. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome to our AI Agents and Action series, brought to you by Google Cloud, where we go beyond the hype to focus on the leaders. We're making it happen. Today, we have Optimizely president, Shaf Islam, here on the program. Welcome to theCUBE.
Shafqat Islam
>> Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
John Furrier
>> So the Google Cloud series, we're unpacking the leaders who are leveraging the AI piece of the business, obviously the cloud scales hitting. What's your vision for the company? Share your thoughts on where you guys are in the market and then we'll get into some of the Google Cloud relationship.
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah, happy to. So first of all, a little bit about Optimizely, we're the world's leading digital experience platform. So what does that mean? We work with some of the biggest brands in the world like Starbucks or Nike or Gap. And we help power marketing solutions across content. So helping them create and publish great content, measure and optimize that content, run tests and run analytics on that. So the entire marketing lifecycle. Now, everything we do across that marketing lifecycle is powered by AI. And we recently launched an agentic AI AI platform to help marketers transform both the way they work, but also the results and the business outcomes they drive. It's been a journey. And I think what's exciting for us is there's a lot of demand as you can imagine for AI and agents. And what we see is that demand is coming top down. When we talk to the C-suite, whether it's CMOs, CEOs, DFOs or board, they're telling their marketing leaders, "Hey, you're not allowed to hire new marketing headcount unless you can prove that you can't do that work with agents first or with AI first." So we do see there's a lot of market pull. Maybe one other point I'll just make is there's also a lot of noise in the market, so what's truly AI and what's truly agentic. And our goal is to help marketers get over that hump from experimental POCs, proof of concepts, just tests that they're doing with AI, to real production-ready, enterprise-ready use cases that are driving business value.
John Furrier
>> The two hottest areas, you just point out the marketing side. Code assistance, we're seeing that. That's great, but that's all going to apply in here too. If you look at some of the hottest areas that we're seeing in the market, it is go-to-market marketing activities, our workflows that are well understood in the legacy sense, but also there's an AI native angle to it where every CMO is under the pressure to have an answer. "What's your strategy?"
Now, I guess that's a good mandate, but how are you seeing the actions? Because the tooling is coming online, you guys are in the middle of it. Content and context plays a huge role in how AI works well. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because this is one of the hottest areas. "Yeah, I can do marketing materials, I can optimize that. That's all cool. Great." But where's the action and how does that drive business? It seems to be those two conversations are going to coming together very quickly.
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah. First of all, I love that question around context. So let's start there. I think context is king in the AI world. I think people have said that before because otherwise what you're going to get is frankly AI slop. There's a lot of generative AI content out there, whether it's marketing content or campaigns or creative or briefs, which all looks kind of good maybe in a demo or maybe in a proof of concept, but you would never really use it in a production use case because the quality just isn't there. But in order to get quality, so going from 80% good enough to 99% or 100, you need great context, context about your business, about your personas, your products, your differentiators. The way I like to think about it for folks who we are talking to is imagine you are a marketer and you're going to hire a human to join your team. You're not just going to let them start creating content or manage marketing activities on day one. You teach them about your business, you onboard them. And it's a process that could take a month, three months, six months, 12 months until they build enterprise and build expertise in your enterprise. It's the same thing for AI and agents. You need to onboard your agents like you would humans, and you do that by providing amazing context. And we talk about context engineering as a way to layer in the right context to the AI at the right time because you need to find the sweet spot of context. Too much context and you will get context rot or the AI could get confused. Too little context, the output is too generic. So getting the context right I think is the number one priority for any business that's launching in the AI space.
John Furrier
>> I love how you brought that in because I think you guys are right in line there. And I love what you're doing with your company because it's not just content marketing that's old days. Remember the old MarTech stacks? Now we're living in an AI native world, so I want to get the tie in to how you guys are taking advantage of that and then Google Cloud, because every marketer, it's not obvious that all that front end work has to be done. They think they could shortcut it in and just get going and then iterate. When actually if you do, the more you do upfront on, say, context or understanding the data sources, the better and faster the AI gets to value. One, do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? Because this seems to be a common misunderstanding like, "Well, we'll just jump in and get a low-hanging fruit use case." But actually you can do that and prepare because they have data markers are data-driven. So what's your thoughts on that?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah, I mean, you're totally right. You got to do the work up front and enrich your AI product with context. Otherwise, the common refrain is, "Well, I could just do that through ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or any of these other products." Obviously we believe Gemini is the best product out there and we've kind of bet our business on top of Gemini. But no matter what tooling you use or what LLM you use, the main thing is you need to be able to add the context in order to get the outcomes you want. And we believe Gemini provides so much flexibility and kind of technical advancement around how you can provide context. And we'll get into why we chose Gemini in a second, but one other thing that I just want to point out to marketing leaders is also having AI in the context of where your users are working, so in the workflow, we believe that also drives massive levels of adoption. Because if you need to constantly swivel chair between products, so I'm in one product now, but now I have to go to somewhere else to generate content, go to a different tool to execute on an agent, you're going to lose adoption immediately. And so we think, and that's how we've built Opal, which is our AI orchestration platform, is that it's totally embedded in the workflows of where your marketers are. It's where they're planning their campaigns, where they're creating content to publish to their CMS if they're running a test. Opal is available right inside of the workflows where they are working already today.
John Furrier
>> You're bringing AI into the workflow user, human, who's at the point of attack, if you will, on the execution.
Shafqat Islam
>> Yep. Yeah. And that obviously, we talk about humans in the loop all the time. The added benefit there is if it's already where your humans are working and you have agents doing the work on your behalf or assisting you with the work, the human is there to review the work of the agent. And again, it's all seamless inside of that product. And really for us, the Opal product, it works amazingly well with the Optimizely product itself because they're very tightly integrated. And maybe just for your listeners who may not be familiar with Opal, Opal helps you do three things; build your own agents, power those agents with really advanced capabilities and tools and integrations to the entire marketing stack, and then you can use those agents, chain them together in workflows to execute on actual marketing work.
John Furrier
>> That's awesome. Love that. Love that mention. Talk about the partnership with Google. Why are you partnering with Google Cloud? Obviously they got a slew of things that they're advancing in A to A area, and you're seeing that with agents need to talk to other agents. There's a lot of agentic things there. They also got the agent marketplace and marketers. What are the core technology integrations that you're seeing with Google Cloud?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we'll get to marketplace later. I'll take the first part of your question, like, why Google and why Gemini. We did an evaluation of the whole landscape. We have, I think, one of the best engineering teams in AI out there. We looked at every product, every LLM. And ultimately we chose Gemini as the foundational model for us. And part of it is obviously Google Cloud's technical leadership in AI, the ability to innovate and execute, et cetera. Those are all, I would say, high level, top level benefits. But for us, when we're building an agent orchestration platform, we are looking for a few very specific things where I think Google and Gemini shine. So one is multimodal capabilities. Marketing, it's not just text. It's text, it's images, it's videos. model. But what I love about what Gemini offers is we can select and our customers can choose between various trade-offs like speed and performance. There's flash models, there's pro models, there're thinking models. They have various trade-offs in terms of speed, performance costs, and there's just so much flexibility to choose the right model for the right task. Obviously, Gemini has very large context windows like million plus tokens. And then we serve the enterprise, like data privacy, security governance. These things are really, really important. For us, those are kind of some of the technical reasons why we chose Gemini. I don't know if you have any follow up questions to that, otherwise I can go into a little bit more about A to A and marketplace.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, talk about the technology integration around agents because A to A, we saw MCP rise out of the organic A to A, little bit different flavor to it. There's also some other glue layers around agents. What are the key things that you're doing with Google Cloud that can provide the value to the customers because agents have to be trusted, right?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> So you have a whole trust equation going on. Obviously Gemini, from a performance standpoint, robustness, that's key. But I'm looking at the integration. How do you take advantage of the best of Google while getting the value for you guys for customers?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah, it's a great question. First of all, on MCP, the way I think about MCP is just the persona that you're targeting, right? We have customers who are marketers. They're not necessarily fussed with MCP. But we have a lot of our personas who use our products who are developers, right? They're developers who want to interact with our CMS product or our testing product. MCP is a great way to give developers access to all the richness and all of the AI capabilities that we have. Now, when it comes to A to A specifically, to us, interoperability is a huge priority because it's not about what we want, it's about what our customers want. So if you put the customer lens on, put our customers first, we want to make sure that customers can use agents, whether it's Opal agents, Google agents, other agents have created in other software tools. We need to be agnostic. We need to be composable. And A to A for us allows our customers to bridge across any of those agents in a very easy and simple way. What I love about A to A, it's not just a Google thing. Google donated A to A, I think to the Linux Foundation. So it's open source. I mean it's publicly adopted by so many huge companies out there. So for us, it's not just about interoperability. In addition, it also unlocks a lot of different use cases. Just think the MarTech stack is complex, it's sprawling. There's a lot of tools out there, a lot of products that have agents. So allowing us to combine the best of what Opal does within our product portfolio and then tie it with other products that may exist out there, other agents that may exist out there, it really unlocks new types of value for our customers.
John Furrier
>> What kind of metrics on those use cases can you quantify? I know there's been obviously the combined solution. What are some of the data points?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah. So for us, we have a lot of different products. So we kind of look at metrics across those different products or use cases. So as an example, Optimizely has a huge testing like an A/B testing and product testing business. We've noticed that the volume of experiments that a customer can run has gone up by 79% if they're using Opal and AI that's obviously powered by Gemini. We've also noticed productivity gains and efficiency gains. So the time, that we've reduced the time to complete marketing campaigns, so like the work behind marketing campaigns by 54%. So there's both efficiency gains, there's velocity improvements to get campaigns and content out the door. And we're seeing pretty massive adoption. There's almost 10,000 agentic actions being taken per day across our customers since we launched just six months ago, Opal. So there's a lot of benefit. And one thing I love about what Opal and agents unlock is it's not just about making existing work more efficient or taking existing work and increasing the velocity of it. Agents allow our customers to do things that they could never think about doing having the old way in the old manual human way because it just wasn't a scalable proposition. So it unlocks a new set of work and capabilities that they would never even try to begin with because it was never a scalable thing with humans. So that to me is always interesting. There's the stuff that we make better that they're already doing, and then there's all this stuff that they can do now that they never tried before.
John Furrier
>> Well, you got some great momentum. That's awesome. Congratulations. I have to ask, how you guys are extending your reach with Google Cloud? Obviously the marketplace. I'm a huge fan of the marketplace because the joint marketing is self-service. I mean click, click, then you got the solution. Talk about that impact to you guys. What's been some of the results? What's the playbook there?
Shafqat Islam
>> Let's start with the impact and the result, and then we'll talk about why we love marketplace. So it all comes back to business impact because I have to talk to my CEO and my CFO. It's growth. But simply, Opal is the fastest growing product that we've ever launched at our company. And the reason we're getting so much growth is because of marketplace. And it's not just Opal. All of our products are on marketplace. So I really see two benefits of being on Google Cloud Marketplace. So number one is, again, just putting on the customer lens is reducing friction. We want to reduce friction during the purchase cycle. We want to allow our customers to burn down any committed spend they have with Google and just make it really easy for our customers. We make it easy for our customers, we grow as well. And then I think secondly, being in Google Cloud Marketplaces, it's about reach, brand, education so that even more customers kind of hear about us, see us. So much of Opal and AI, but all of our other products is about trust as well. Google is an extremely trusted brand. So for us it's also just giving us that extra reach and kind of thought leadership and marketing opportunities like this interview, so I'm very grateful.
John Furrier
>> And they're doing as a sales development, as a go-to-market benefit too. Can you share that? Because I think that's been one of the things that jumps out right now in this market, is that the go-to-market costs and benefits are there. What's your experience?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah, again, just going back to the outcome, we're trying to increase customer lifetime value and we're trying to reduce our sales and marketing costs and improve sales and marketing efficiency. So Google Cloud Marketplace allows us to do that. So there's a few things which is beyond just faster sales and a better customer experience. What I like to measure is like, are we improving retention? And the way we measure that is, yeah, we have more multi-year deals. I'm trying to see our ACVs, like deal size is getting bigger, and they have by almost 20%. The other things I measure is sales cycles. Are sales cycles getting shorter? They have by an average 15 days. And finally, in order to grow, we have to win in sales cycles. And our close rates have gone up by 6%. So the team is pretty pumped and my CFO is happy about it. So it's not just the innovation on Gemini, but also just the growth that's being driven by marketplace. I think it's a pretty powerful combo.
John Furrier
>> Shaf, great to have you on. And again, congratulations. I guess my final question is what are you optimizing for these days with the team? Obviously you've got some growth. What's your focus? What's the plan?
Shafqat Islam
>> Yeah, I think there's a day when marketing teams and the marketing org is going to look very, very different. It's going to be infinite workforce and we're no longer going to be hindered or constrained by how many people we can hire. And so we're really getting ready for that future where agents are going to be running and executing a large part of the marketing organization. And to me, that's exciting. It's not about job replacement, it's about job creation. It frees up our marketers to work on the things that they love doing, being more creative, being more strategic. So we always keep that end in mind. I think Opal for us is a disproportionate bet on the upside of AI, and I think it's going to be transformative for our business. So we're excited.
John Furrier
>> Awesome. Love Opal. Love the AI agents in action. Totally resonates with the theme. Congratulations and thanks for sharing.
Shafqat Islam
>> Of course. Thank you for having me. It was fun.
John Furrier
>> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier