What Is Sitecore Stream?

Marketers are under increasing pressure to deliver personalized digital experiences that engage customers at every touchpoint. Meeting those demands means creating more content assets and campaigns to outdo the competition, and leading DXP solutions are adding AI capabilities to support these endeavors.

Sitecore Stream is a set of AI tools integrated into the Sitecore product suite. It supports marketing tasks such as content creation, message personalization, translation, and more. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Sitecore Stream uses advanced large language model (LLM) technology to help marketers increase productivity and achieve their goals.

In this post, we’ll explain how Sitecore Stream works, its benefits to marketing teams, and hidden truths that marketing teams should know.

How Sitecore Stream Works

Sitecore Stream provides an orchestration layer that unifies Sitecore’s products into a seamless marketing experience. Stream uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground the AI and extract brand-specific information from uploaded guidelines without retraining the LLM.

Additionally, Sitecore adheres to strict data privacy and security protocols, ensuring that customer data is never used to train the LLM. Built-in AI guardrails protect sensitive information throughout the marketing workflow.

Once customers have access to the Cloud Portal, they can provision the free tier of Sitecore Stream themselves. However, many AI capabilities are only available with the Stream Premium tier.

After provisioning, Sitecore Stream is readily available in supported Sitecore products, allowing users to access AI capabilities through each interface.

Additionally, customers can access the Stream app and toggle between Projects, Brand Kits, or the Brand Assistant.

Key Capabilities

Stream enables marketing teams to influence the entire content-experience lifecycle through its three key capabilities: brand-aware AI, copilots and agents, and agentic workflows.

Brand-aware AI

Brand-aware AI ensures a company’s brand identity is applied consistently across Sitecore products. Teams can upload key brand documents in Stream to create brand knowledge, and the LLM then pulls information from those brand resources so that AI tools can create content that matches your brand’s tone, style, and messaging.

Brand-aware AI helps marketing teams generate relevant, consistent content that aligns with brand guidelines. Eventually, Sitecore plans to expand the scope to include other sources such as digital assets, campaigns, performance analytics, and audience segments.

Copilots and Agents

Copilots and agents are intelligent assistants embedded across Sitecore products that help accelerate decision-making and task execution, including generating campaign ideas, writing drafts, or tailoring experiences to target audiences.

Copilots help guide decisions, while agents automate actions and respond to natural language or predefined prompts, such as those used with ChatGPT, Claude, or other LLM tools that customers would be familiar with. Currently, Sitecore offers the following copilots:

• Brand Copilot: Used to create on-brand content with the help of the Brand Assistant.

• Content Copilot: Helps with content-related tasks with features such as content translation, image tagging, and AI content optimization and personalization.

• Experience Copilot: Enables advanced search capabilities with features like visual searches and Q&A generation.

Sitecore plans to add more features, including semantic searches, content exploration, component generation, hypothesis generation, and A/B testing recommendations.

Agentic Workflows

Agentic AI solutions can act autonomously and take actions to achieve specific goals without human oversight. However, at this stage of Sitecore Stream, agentic workflows are orchestration tools that streamline project management across Sitecore products. With the help of Stream, teams can orchestrate marketing campaigns, product launches, and ad strategies.

While agentic workflows currently rely on agents to assist with decision-making or executing project management tasks, the ultimate goal is for these systems to autonomously make decisions, initiate actions, and adapt to changing project needs.

Currently, Stream offers a personalized dashboard for tracking assigned tasks and project status, as well as a centralized workspace for collaboration and progress monitoring, similar to popular project management solutions.

Sitecore Stream App

Teams can also access various features directly from the Sitecore Stream app.

Brand Kits: Upload brand documents to build brand knowledge and generate brand kit sections.

Brand-Aware Chat: Explore brand knowledge and brand kits through natural language queries related to your brand.

Brief Generation: Generate campaign or creative brief drafts with minimal input, following a standard structure suitable for most organizations.

Brainstorming: Create long-form content that aligns with your brand’s voice and identity, such as blog posts and articles.

Orchestration: Use Projects to create and manage deliverables and tasks across teams and Sitecore products in a centralized workspace, and use My Day to track assigned tasks and project statuses.

Task and Deliverable Recommendations: Use AI to generate suggestions for tasks and deliverables.

Interactions Dashboard: Administrators can monitor how AI-powered features are used in Sitecore.

How Sitecore Stream Benefits Marketing Teams

Sitecore Stream was created by marketers for marketers. This means that it offers several benefits that are particularly useful for marketing teams.

• Brand Consistency: Brand-aware AI marketing assets are aligned with brand guidelines, ensuring consistency.

• Improved Decision Making: Stream’s AI capabilities enable teams to make data-driven decisions and deliver exceptional digital experiences.

• Security: Stream provides enterprise-grade security to protect sensitive data with built-in guardrails to prevent LLM training.

• Faster Time to Market: With Stream, teams can speed up tasks like translation and localization to release global campaigns faster.

• Improved Productivity: Sitecore Stream automates repetitive tasks, such as content tagging, allowing teams to focus on more strategic and revenue-generating tasks.⠀

What to Know About Sitecore Stream

Sitecore Stream is the beginning of Sitecore’s journey to creating the Intelligent DXP. However, enterprises assessing it should be aware of potential pitfalls at this roadmap stage.

Similarities to Other GenAI Tools

Sitecore Stream is similar to many third-party generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. This means that teams already using these solutions for tasks such as content generation may not immediately benefit from adopting Sitecore Stream.

However, adding brand kits allows Stream to offer a more secure option than third-party tools. Instead of toggling between and copying and pasting content across different tools, Stream provides a walled garden that protects sensitive information within the marketing workflow.

Workflow Changes & Limitations

One limitation of Sitecore Stream is that marketing teams must adapt their workflows to use it. Companies using custom GPTs or project management software, such as Asana, Trello, and Jira, to organize campaigns may not fully leverage the capabilities of Sitecore Stream. Until the promise of true agentic workflows becomes a reality, adopting Sitecore Stream could be a workflow problem rather than a solution.

Features Across Sitecore Products

Sitecore Stream is embedded across several Sitecore products. Here are some of the AI-assisted features that teams can currently use:

Content Hub

• Visual Search: Find image assets in Content Hub quickly using image color, text descriptions, and other visual cues.

• Content Generation: Generate, refine, or improve text within content item fields.

• Content Translation: Localize content for multiple markets by creating variants in different languages.

• Grounded Image Tagging: Improve image searchability with AI-suggested relevant and consistent tags.

XM Cloud

• AI Content Optimization: Refine, adapt, or generate content by writing a manual prompt or selecting a quick action in the XM Cloud page builder.

• A/B/n Testing: Test AI-optimized content with the original version to make data-driven decisions about which one to use.

• Personalization: Generate or rewrite text for different audiences using AI.

• Insights Dashboard: View assigned tasks on the Insights dashboard.

• Brand Intelligence: Set up a brand kit in Sitecore Stream and apply it to individual sites, ensuring that AI-driven outputs in XM Cloud align with the brand's context, guidelines, and tone of voice.

Experience Platform (XP)

• Content Generation: Create and optimize content directly in Sitecore XP using single-line, multiple-line, and rich-text fields.

• Site Item Translation: Use AI to create and update language versions of a site item and translate its supported fields.

• Brand Kits: Set up a brand kit in Stream and select it to guide the AI-assisted content generation outputs.

• Brand Assistant: Use natural language to interact with brand knowledge and brand kits, ensuring alignment with brand guidelines.

• Projects: Create and manage projects, tasks, and deliverables related to content development.

Sitecore Search

• Questions and Answers: Ask natural language questions and receive AI-generated answers from brand content collections and the Sitecore Search domain.

CDP

• Gensights: Use an AI-powered dashboard that helps teams quickly identify the most relevant insights from Sitecore CDP dashboards and recommendations to improve customer engagement and digital performance.

• Code Assistant: Create JavaScript for audience export, custom conditions, and session traits with the help of an AI-powered tool that generates JavaScript using natural language prompts.

Personalize

• Code Assistant: Write custom conditions, programmables, and session traits faster with the help of an AI-powered tool that generates JavaScript using natural language prompts.⠀

Wrapping Up

Sitecore Stream is a powerful tool that enables marketing teams to enhance productivity and accelerate time to market with the aid of AI. However, given its similarities with other GenAI tools and the likely workflow changes required to maximize its benefits, teams need knowledgeable support.

Oshyn is a Sitecore partner with decades of experience in all aspects of Sitecore. Whether you need help deciding which composable solutions make the most sense for your business, implementing a new solution, or customizing Sitecore Stream, Oshyn can assist.

Contact us to learn how to get the most out of Sitecore products.