Opticon London 2026: AI Insights for Marketing Leaders

The gap is in how teams work, not in the tools

Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger opened with a London Underground classic: mind the gap. On one side is the AI hype. On the other is the real work of shipping campaigns and serving customers, and with new methods and models entering the market every other day, that gap is getting wider.

A line he said that really stuck with me was: “Cutting headcount is not a growth strategy. You can only cut 100%.” What he means here is that individual AI productivity does not compound. The return comes when your whole chain changes: the content operation, the testing, the workflows between people.

He made it concrete with Julia, an Optimizely employee who leads integrated marketing and AI adoption. The role did not exist a year ago. “If you don’t have a Julia,” Alex said, “you need one.” I couldn’t agree with Alex more here. For AI to work, you’re going to need top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top structural changes, and without the centralised accountability of a ‘Julia’, you’re risking a haphazard implementation that will eat up your AI budget.

If you read between the lines, Optimizely now sells an AI platform, not a suite of applications

The product keynote confirmed a shift that has been coming for a while. Optimizely now presents itself as an agent platform, renamed from Opal to Mark, built around three experiences: the marketer’s, the customer’s and the agent’s.

For your marketing teams, the biggest headline was virtual teammates. These are agents with their own identity, permissions, and email address that act on their own initiative and hand work to each other, with a human approving along the way. You can use seven of them already.

For your customers, though, it’s no exaggeration to say that how they engage with your brand is about to change forever. Agents will be capable of generating ABM pages for individual accounts and even individual people, and keep personalising and optimising pages without anyone setting up each test. Building a page around a named person from CRM data and call transcripts is impressive.

And commercially? Well, this is where reading between the lines reveals something of a titanic change in how Optimizely will exist going forward. The platform is wide open. These agents can connect to your Salesforce, HubSpot, Contentful, and any other place your customer data is reachable via an API, then use it to create and edit content in your CMS. That’s huge. Does it mean you can take advantage of the agentic platform without migrating your whole marketing suite to Optimizely? It might, and it’s something we’ll be writing more about in the future.

Of course, with all your customer data flowing, Alex was quick to reassure us that Optimizely takes governance seriously for European users. GDPR considerations, guardrails, evaluations, and full audit trails built in. For our clients, at least, this is usually a top priority when discussing AI agents.

For your next budget, you should plan for cost per outcome

President Shafqat Islam nodded to growing tension around AI. Marketers worry about quality and consistency, while CEOs and CFOs worry about runaway costs. With Optimizely customers now using around 3 trillion tokens a year, that’s a reasonable worry.

His solution was to route each task to the cheapest model that can do it well enough. Otherwise, in his words, “It’s like taking a Ferrari to the grocery store.” What’s interesting, and what some of you might not know, is that Optimizely has set up its own AI lab to train smaller models for specific marketing tasks, which it says run up to ten times cheaper than frontier models in internal testing. It also built a marketing benchmark of nearly 300 tasks, which it will open-source. Mark scored 67% on it against 60% for Claude Code, at half the cost.

These are Optimizely’s numbers on their own benchmark, and I would like to see independent runs once it is public. But the idea makes total sense. Whoever can explain the return on tokens spent to a CFO will keep their AI budgets.

The tools are ready. Let’s make them work for your business.

If you’re deciding where to start or what to invest in next, let’s talk about the use cases, ways of working, and priorities that can make AI pay off.

Grzegorz Kałucki: Commercial Director Poland; (+48)664025979|grzegorz.kalucki@noaignite.com

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Here’s what you should take from Opticon London 2026Here’s what you should take from Opticon London 2026

The tools are ready. Let’s make them work for your business.

Facing complexity? We’re ready to listen.

Here’s what you should take from Opticon London 2026