Opticon 2025: The future of marketing is hybrid
How AI and human creativity converge in the Onederverse
During Opticon London 2025, Optimizely's annual flagship event, more than 1,600 digital professionals gathered to witness how AI is driving the next marketing revolution. Under the theme "Enter the Onederverse," Optimizely demonstrated that we're not simply stepping into a new era – we're entering a completely new dimension where humans and machines collaborate in real time.
From iO, we attended with William Parr, Maarten de Schepper, Patrick de Kort, Andy van de Sande, Koen Roos, Bart Roofthooft, and Karolien Vanherp, alongside clients Etex Group and Beaulieu International Group. Our mission? To gather inspiration and insights – and discover how we can further help our clients achieve their digital objectives.
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The atmosphere of Opticon: innovation, energy and experimentation
The tone of the event was unmistakable: innovation with real-world impact. Where AI was once primarily a promise, at Opticon we witnessed the vision and continued development of AI within the Optimizely landscape – and how this shapes the future of the marketing technology ecosystem for our clients. Keynotes, breakout sessions and live demos showed how brands worldwide are integrating AI into content creation, experimentation and customer journeys.
The overarching theme of the day? The hybrid era. Organisations that want to grow must learn to operate in a world that is part human, part agentic. In other words: human creativity combined with the scale and speed of AI.
For organisations, this means:
Dual optimisation strategy (people and agents)
New success metrics (technical and human trust)
Experimentation-first culture
Gradual AI transformation
"We find ourselves at a new internet moment. AI is no longer a feature, it's the operating system for marketing."
Alexander Atzberger, CEO Optimizely
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Our key insights from Opticon 2025
1. AI is the foundation – not a feature
Optimizely positions AI as the backbone of its platform – a vision we recognise. We also see that AI only truly makes an impact for our clients when it's approached not as an add-on, but as a core component of strategy and delivery.
The Opal AI platform evolved from assistant to a fully-fledged agent orchestration system – an intelligent layer that enables people and AI agents to work together on content, campaigns and experiments. With nearly 10,000 daily Opal actions worldwide, adoption has grown explosively.
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2. From AI output to smart action
Building on this, we demonstrate where our expertise makes the difference. AI can automate many tasks, but real impact only emerges when the output is correctly interpreted and translated into actions. At iO, our added value lies in combining data, experiments, and AI output with our experience: we help clients interpret results, make smart iterations, and take strategic decisions. This way, we not only make AI operational but also increase the value we deliver as a partner.
3. GEO is the new SEO
Search behaviour is changing rapidly. Optimizely shared that the proportion of AI overviews in search results is rising sharply, and search queries are becoming increasingly longer (15+ words) because users want answers – not just results.
We recognise this trend too, though we see in our own analyses that AI agents today account for less than 5% of total traffic. But that 5% is growing logarithmically each quarter, indicating that the shift is approaching rapidly.
This change forces us to look beyond traditional SEO. The new playing field is called GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation, where visibility in AI-driven environments revolves around knowledge, reliability and technical readability.
Several building blocks remain crucial:
Strong structured data
Reliable E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)
Technical consistency and compliance
For us, this confirmed our own insights: we actively help clients optimise their content and infrastructure for a world where machines don't just index information but also interpret and recommend it.
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4. The antidote to uncertainty is experimentation
Whilst search behaviour changes at breakneck speed, one principle remains: progress begins with optimisation, including through experimentation. For us at iO, this isn't a new insight, but a confirmation of what we experience daily.
Experimentation is the bridge between uncertainty and growth for organisations. In our projects, we see that teams who dare to test learn faster what actually works – whether it's content, conversion or customer journeys. AI accelerates this process, but human curiosity remains the fuel.
Optimizely's figures (79% higher experiment velocity, 10% better win rates) demonstrate this: organisations that structurally embrace experimentation build resilience. This is precisely the mindset we encourage at iO – a culture where 'learning by doing' is more important than 'being right'.
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5. Visual-to-code revolution
A much-discussed demo: converting Figma designs directly into working code – without dependence on development teams. Yet the impact is broader than that. The real change lies in the new 'backbone' of the platform.
Opal AI is now active across all facets of Optimizely One. Thanks to the new Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, all applications can exchange data directly:
Statistics from Optimizely Analytics
Experiment data from the Experience Suite
Visual assets from the DAM
Issue management from CMP
This means you can ask Opal AI for a website performance report, or suggestions for new experiments based on previous results.
It becomes even more powerful when you connect external systems via MCP adapters. Think of content migration from another CMS, or the integration between Figma and GitHub where the developer increasingly doesn't need to be the link between marketer and designer.
For our clients, this means faster experimentation, smarter collaboration between teams, and more focus on creating valuable digital experiences.
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6. Trust gains two dimensions
Opticon made clear that trust – the foundation of every digital experience – now consists of two layers:
Human trust
Brand reputation
Authenticity
Customer experience
Technical trust
Structured data
Accessibility
Consistency
API reliability for agent interactions
In other words: we build brands that are not only trusted by people, but are also technically reliably interpreted by machines. When search engines, agents or MCP systems technically 'understand' the content, this not only increases digital visibility but also the trust value of the brand with end users. That's the core of future-proof marketing: trust as a shared language between human and machine.
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From promise to practice
Opticon 2025 showed that AI is no longer future music, but daily reality. Organisations that experiment and integrate now are setting the tone for the coming years.
We stand at the start of a new era where brands build experiences that are as human as they are intelligent. The question is no longer whether AI will transform your marketing, but how quickly you dare to start that journey.
For iO, this means we continue to strengthen our strategy and approach around the synergy between data, creativity and technology. We don't just look at how AI can be applied, but especially at how it can be structurally integrated into our clients' platforms. In doing so, we deploy our expertise in prompt engineering and AI orchestration to help businesses better understand, control and use AI within their daily marketing practice.
This way, we build marketing solutions together that remain human-centred but benefit from the scale, speed and precision that AI makes possible – so that innovation always adds value to genuine customer experience.
Want to know how we can put all this into practice for you?
Get in touch
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