If you’re in the world of Oracle Cloud, you are most likely busy planning your big switch to Redwood. While it’s easy to get excited about a new look and a plethora of AI features, I want to take some time to talk about a tool that’s new (at least to me) that comes along with Redwood. Functional users will come to know VB Studio as the new method for delivering page customizations, but I’ve learned it’s much more.

VB Studio has been around since 2020, but I only started learning about it recently. At its core, VB Studio is Oracle’s extension platform. It provides users with a safe way to customize by building around their systems instead of inside of it. Since changes to the core code are not allowed, upgrades are much less problematic and time consuming.  Let’s look at how users of different expertise might use VB Studio.

Oracle Cloud Application Developers

I wouldn’t call myself a developer, but this is the area I fit into. Moving forward, I will not be using Page Composer or HCM Experience Design Studio…and I’m pretty happy about that. Every client I work with wants customization, so having a one-stop shop with Redwood is a game-changer after years of juggling tools.

Sandboxes are gone. VB Studio uses Git repositories with branches to track and log every change. Branches let multiple people work on different features without conflict, and teams review and merge changes into the main branch in a controlled process.

And what about when these changes are ready for production? By setting up a pipeline from your development environment to your production environment, these changes can be pushed straight into production. This is huge for me! It reduces the time needed to implement new Oracle modules. It also helps with updating or changing existing systems as well. I’ve spent countless hours on video calls instructing system administrators on how to perform requested changes in their production environment because their policy did not allow me to have access. Now, I can make these changes in a development instance and push them to production. The sys admin can then view these changes and approve or reject them for production. Simple!

Low-Code Developers

Customizations to existing features are great, but what about building entirely new functionality and embedding it right into your system?  VB Studio simplifies building applications, letting low-code developers move quickly without getting bogged down in traditional coding. With VB Studio’s visual designer, developers can drag and drop components, arrange them the way they want, and preview changes instantly. This is exciting for me because I feel like it is accessible for someone who does very little coding. Of course, for those who need more flexibility, you can still add custom logic using familiar web technologies like JavaScript and HTML (also accessible with the help of AI). Once your app is ready, deployment is easy. This approach means quicker turnaround, less complexity, and applications that fit your business needs perfectly.

Experienced Programmers

Okay, now we’re getting way out of my league here, so I’ll be brief. If you really want to get your hands dirty by modifying the code of an application created by others, you can do that. If you prefer building a completely custom application using the web programming language of your choice, you can also do that. Oracle offers users a wide range of tools and stays flexible in how they use them. Organizations need tailored systems, and Oracle keeps evolving to make that possible.

https://www.oracle.com/application-development/visual-builder-studio/

In my last blog post I addressed how to prepare your team for a unique experience and have them primed and ready for brainstorming.

Now I want to cover what actually happens INSIDE the brainstorming session itself. What activities should be included? How do you keep the energy up throughout the session?

Here’s a detailed brainstorming framework and agenda you can follow to generate real results. It works whether you have 90 minutes or a full day; whether you are tackling product innovation, process improvement, strategic planning, or problem solving; and whether you have 4 people on the team or 12 (try not to do more than that). Feel free to pick and choose what you like and adjust to fit your team and desired depth.

Pre-Session Checklist

• Room Setup: Seating arranged to encourage collaboration (avoid traditional conference setups), background music playing softly, be free to move around. Being offsite is best!
• Materials: Whiteboards, sticky notes, markers, small and large paper pads, dot stickers for voting, projector/screen.
• Helpers: Enlist volunteers to capture ideas, manage breakout groups, and tally votes. Ensure they know their roles ahead of time.
• Technology: If you’re using digital tools, screen sharing, or virtual whiteboards, test everything before the team arrives.
• Breaks: Make sure you plan for breaks. People need mental and physical break periods.
• Food: Have snacks and beverages ready. If you have a session over 3 hours, plan lunch and/or supper.

1. Welcome the Team (5-20 minutes)

As people arrive, keep things light to set the tone. Try to keep a casual conversation going, laughs are ideal! This isn’t another meeting, it’s a space for creative thinking.

If anyone participated in personal disruptions ahead of the meeting, (with no pressure) see if they’ll share. As the facilitator, have your own ready to share and also explain the room disruptions you’ve set up.

2. Mental Warmups (5-20 minutes)

The personal disruptions mentioned in my other post are meant to break people out of their mental ruts. This period of warm up is meant to achieve the same thing.

Many facilitators do this with ice breakers. I personally don’t like them and have had better luck with other approaches. Consider sharing some optical illusions or brain teasers that stretch their minds rather than putting them on the spot with forced socialization.

That said, ice breakers that get people up and building something together can work too, if you have one you like. Things like small teams building the tallest tower out of toothpicks and mini-marshmallows is a common one that works well.

3. Cover the Brainstorming Ground Rules (2-10 minutes)

• No Bad Ideas: Save negativity for later. Right now, we’re generating not judging.
• Quantity Over Quality: More ideas mean more chances for success. Aim for volume.
• Wild Ideas Welcome: Suspend reality temporarily. One impossible idea can spark a feasible one.
• No Ownership Battles: Ideas belong to the team. Collaboration beats competition.
• Build on Others: Use “Yes, and…” thinking. Evolve, merge, and improve ideas together.
• Stay Present: No emails, no phones. Even during breaks, don’t get distracted.

These rules should be available throughout the session. Consider hanging a poster with them or sharing an attendee packet that includes it. If anyone is attending remotely, share these in the chat area.

As the facilitator, you should be prepared to enforce these rules!

4. Frame the Challenge (5-20 minutes)

Why are we here today? What’s the goal of this brainstorming session? What do we hope to achieve after spending hours together?

This is a critical time to ensure everyone’s head is in the right place before diving into the actual brainstorming. We’re not here just to have fun, we’re here to solve a business problem. Use whatever information you have to enlighten the team on current state, desired state, competition, business data, customer feedback…whatever you have.

Now that we have everyone mentally prepared, consider a short break after this.

5.A. Individual Ideation (5-15 minutes)

This time is well spent whether you had your team generate ideas ahead of time or not. Even if you asked them to, you cannot expect everyone to have devoted time to think about your business objective ahead of time. You will end up with more diverse ideas if you keep this individual time in the agenda.

Here, we want to provide your attendees with paper, pens, and/or sticky notes, and set a timer. Remind them that quantity of ideas is the goal.

Ask the team on their own to come up with 10+ ideas in 5 minutes. They can compete to see who comes up with the most. Keep some soft background music playing (instrumental music). Consider dropping a “crazy bomb of an idea” as an example… something completely unrealistic and surprising, just to jar their minds one last time before they start. Show them that it’s OK to be wild in their suggestions.

When the round is done, optionally, you can take the next 5-10 minutes hearing some of the team’s favorites. Not all, just the favorites. Write them on a board, or post the sticky notes up.

5.B. Second Round of Individual Ideation (10-20 minutes)

If you have time, do a second round of individual idea creation, but this time introduce lateral thinking. Using random entry to show them that ideas can be triggered through associations. Have snippets of paper with random words for each person to draw from a bowl or hat. Give them an additional 5 or 10 minutes to come up with another set of ideas that relates to the word they selected.

For this second round you should be prepared to help anyone who struggles. You can suggest connections to their selected word, or push them to explore synonyms, antonyms, or other associations. For instance, if they draw “tiger”, you can associate animal, cat, jungle, teeth, claws, stripes, fur, orange, black, white, predator, aggression, primal, mascot, camouflage, frosted flakes, breakfast, sports, Detroit, baseball, Cincinnati, football, apparel, clothing, costume, Halloween, and more!

The associations are endless. They draw “tiger”, associate “stripe”, and relate that to the objective in how “striping” could mean updating parts of a system, and not all of it. Or they associate “baseball” and relate that to the objective in how a “bunt” is a strategic move that averts expectations and gets you on base.

6. Idea Sharing (10-60 minutes)

This portion of brainstorming is where ideas start to come together. When people start sharing their initial ideas, others get inspired. Remind everyone that we’re not after ownership, we’re collectively trying to solve the business problem. Your helpers can take notes on who was involved in an idea, so they can later be tagged for additional input or the project team.

This step can be nerve-wracking. Professionals may be uncertain about sharing half-baked ideas, but this is what we need! Don’t pressure anyone, so you, as the facilitator, can offer to share ideas on their behalf if they would like that.

As part of this step, begin identifying patterns and themes. People’s first ideas are generally the easy ones that multiple people will have (including your competitors). There will be similarities. Group those ideas now and try to give the groupings easy to reference names.

The bulk of the ideas are now in everyone’s heads, consider a short break after this.

7. Idea Expansion (20-60 minutes)

As the team comes back from a break, do a round of dot voting. Your ideas are pasted up and grouped, and the team has had some time to let those ideas settle in their minds. Now we’re ready to start driving the focus of the rest of this session.

There should be a set of concepts that are most intriguing to the team. Now, you will encourage pushing some further, spin-off ideas, and cross-pollination. Even flipping ideas to their opposite is still welcome. SCAMPER is an acronym that applies to creative thinking, and you might print it out and display it for your session today.

Like comedy improv, we still do not want to be negative about any idea. Use “yes, and…” to elaborate on someone’s idea. “I really like this idea, now imagine if we spin it as…” Make sure these expansions are being written down and captured.

8. Wild Card Rounds (10-60 minutes)

If you have a larger group, this time is ideal for break-out sessions. If your group is small, it can be another individual ideation round.

Take the top contending themes and divvy them out to groups or individuals. Then you can run 1-3 speed rounds, rotating themes between rounds.

1. Role Play: Ask them to expand on their theme as if they were Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezzos, Einstein, your competitor, or SpongeBob. This makes them think differently.
2. Constraints: Consider how they would have to change the idea if they were limited by budget, time, quality, or approach. Poetry is beautiful because of its constraints.
3. Wishful Thinking: What could you do if all constraints were lifted? If you were writing a fictional book, how would you make this happen?
4. Exaggeration: Take the idea to the extreme. If the idea as stated is 10%, what does 100% look like? What does 10-times look like?

This level of pushing creativity can be exhausting, consider a break after this.

9. Bring it Together (10-60 minutes)

Update your board with the latest ideas and iterations, if you haven’t already. Give the attendees a few minutes to peruse the posted ideas and reflect. Refresh the favorites list with another round of dot voting.

If time allows, move on from all this divergent thinking, and ask the attendees to list some constraints or areas that need to be investigated for these favorite ideas to work. Keep in mind this is still a “no bad ideas” session, so this effort should be a means to identify next steps for the idea and how to ensure it is successful if it is selected to move forward.

If you still have more time available, start some discussion that could help create a priority matrix after the meeting (like How/Now/Wow). Venture into identifying the following for each of the favorite ideas. We’re just looking for broad strokes and wide ranges today. On a scale of 1-10, where do these fall?

• Impact: How much would this change the story for the business?
• Effort: How much effort from business resources might be required?
• Timeline: What would the timeline look like?
• Cost: Would there be outside costs?

10. Next Steps (5-10 minutes)

This is the last step of this brainstorming session, but this is not the end. Now we fill the team in on what happens next and give them confidence that today’s effort will be useful. Start by asking the team what excited or surprised them the most today, and what they’d like to do again sometime.

Explain to the team how these ideas will be documented and shared out. The team should already be excited about at least one of today’s ideas, they’ll sleep on these ideas and continue thinking. So, let them know that there will be an opportunity to add additional thoughts to their favorites in the days/weeks to come.

Explain if you have any further plans to get feedback from stakeholders, leaders, or customers. If there are decision makers that are not in this meeting, then help your team understand what you’ll be doing to share these collective ideas with those who will make the final call.

Lastly, thank them for their time today. Express your own satisfaction and excitement for what’s to come. Try to squeeze in a few more laughs and build a feeling of teamwork. Consider remarking on something from this meeting as a “you had to be there” type of joke, even if it is the unrealistic bombshell of an idea that gets a laugh.

Tips for the Facilitator

• Energy Management: Watch the room’s energy. If it dips, inject movement. Stand up, stretch, take a quick walk, change the pace with a speed round.
• Protect the Quiet Voices: Don’t let extroverts dominate. Use techniques like written brainstorming and round-robin sharing to ensure everyone contributes.
• Embrace the Awkward Silence: When you ask a question and get silence, resist the urge to fill it. Give people time to think. Count to ten in your head before jumping in, and don’t make them feel like it was a failure to not say anything.
• Document Everything: Assign helpers to photograph whiteboards, capture sticky notes, and record key insights. You’ll lose valuable ideas if you rely on memory alone.
• Keep Your “Crazy Idea Bomb” Ready: If the room gets stuck, be prepared to throw out something intentionally wild to break the pattern. Sometimes the group needs permission to think bigger.
• Stay Neutral: As facilitator, your job is to guide the process, not advocate for specific ideas. You can participate, if you want to, but save your own advocacy for later. No idea is a bad idea in this session.

Conclusion

I hope you find this example brainstorming session agenda helpful! It’s one of my favorite things to run through. Get your team prepped and ready, then deliver an amazing workshop to drive creativity and innovation!

……

If you are looking for a partner to run brainstorming with, reach out to your Perficient account manager or use our contact form to begin a conversation.

The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) in professional sectors, whether in law, finance, healthcare, or government, has reached a fever pitch. AI promises to boost productivity, reduce administrative burdens, and unlock new value across knowledge-based industries. Yet, for many organizations, the reality lags behind the rhetoric. Despite high levels of awareness and pilot projects aplenty, genuine, deep adoption of AI tools remains elusive.

As we stand on the brink of a new era in workplace technology, understanding the human factors that drive or block AI adoption is more critical than ever. The question is no longer if AI will reshape the workplace, but how and how deeply it will embed itself in the daily routines, decisions, and cultures of organizations.

The AI Adoption Gap

A striking paradox defines the current state of AI in the workplace. Surveys show that most professionals are familiar with generative AI, and organizations are investing heavily in pilots and proofs of concept. Yet, according to recent research, only a small minority of firms have moved beyond surface-level or “shallow” adoption to truly embed AI into core processes.

This “adoption gap” has tangible consequences:

• Missed Productivity Gains: Shallow use think drafting emails or summarizing documents, delivers only marginal improvements. The transformative potential of AI is realised only when it is integrated into complex, high-value workflows.
• Shadow IT Risks: Employees frequently use unauthorised or unapproved AI tools in the absence of clear guidelines, exposing organizations to compliance, security, and reputational risks.
• Stalled Innovation: Without deep adoption, firms risk falling behind competitors who are leveraging AI for strategic differentiation.

Bridging this gap requires more than technical solutions. It demands a Behavioral approach, one that acknowledges the role of habits, heuristics, emotions, and social context in shaping how professionals embrace new technology.

Behavioral Science as the Missing Link

To accelerate meaningful AI adoption, organizations must look beyond binary metrics of use and instead understand the continuum of adoption, the barriers at each stage, and the Behavioral levers that can move individuals and teams deeper into productive engagement with AI.

1. Adoption Is a Continuum, Not a Toggle

AI adoption in professional settings is not a simple yes-or-no proposition. Instead, it unfolds along a spectrum:

• No Adoption: AI tools are ignored or avoided.
• Shallow Adoption: AI is used sporadically for low-stakes or auxiliary tasks.
• Deep Adoption: AI is fully integrated into core workflows, driving strategic gains in quality, innovation, and efficiency.

Implication: Organizations must diagnose where teams sit on this continuum and tailor interventions accordingly.

2. Motivation, Capability, and Trust: The Three Drivers of Adoption

Behavioral science identifies three essential ingredients for moving up the adoption ladder:

• Motivation: Do staff see a clear, relevant benefit to using AI?
• Capability: Do they feel able and confident to use AI effectively?
• Trust: Do they believe AI aligns with their values and professional standards?

Each driver comes with its own set of barriers and solutions:

• Motivation Barriers: Low salience of benefits, status quo bias, and “satisficing” (settling for good enough).
  • Solutions: Frame benefits in tangible terms, highlight quick wins, and use social proof and commitment devices.
• Capability Barriers: Friction in workflows, cognitive overload, and lack of operational readiness.
  • Solutions: Integrate AI seamlessly, reduce effort, and provide structured training and time for experimentation.
• Trust Barriers: Perceived threats to competence or identity, inconsistent signals, and doubts about AI’s legitimacy.
  • Solutions: Increase transparency, allow personalization, and celebrate early wins and responsible experimentation.

3. Small Design Choices Have Outsized Impact

Behavioral nudges like default settings, timely prompts, and visible endorsements from leaders can dramatically increase adoption. For example:

• Default AI notetakers in meetings can normalize use and reduce friction.
• Peer comparison and transparency about how AI works build trust and engagement.
• Showcasing successful use cases and creating AI “champions” can drive momentum across teams.

4. Context Matters: One Size Does Not Fit All

Adoption barriers and enablers vary by individual, role, sector, and task. For instance:

• High-stakes or identity-defining tasks (e.g., clinical diagnosis or legal decisions) require greater trust and clearer evidence of AI’s value.
• Adoption rates differ by gender, age, and professional background, highlighting the need for inclusive strategies.

5. From Shallow to Deep: The Real Value Is in Integration

The most significant gains come not from using AI more often, but from embedding it more deeply, redesigning workflows, updating performance metrics, and empowering employees to co-create new processes. Firms that achieve this see outsized returns in productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction.

Charting a Roadmap for AI Adoption

The future of professional work will be shaped as much by behavioral insights as by technical breakthroughs. To unlock the full promise of AI, organizations must:

1. Assess Current Adoption: Map where teams are on the adoption continuum.
2. Diagnose Barriers: Identify motivational, capability, and trust-related obstacles.
3. Co-Design Interventions: Work with staff to develop tailored, behaviorally informed solutions.
4. Pilot, Measure, and Scale: Experiment, gather feedback, and iterate based on what works.
5. Celebrate and Learn: Share successes, acknowledge failures, and foster a culture of responsible AI experimentation.

Leaders committed to the AI-enabled future must move beyond hype and pilot projects. By applying behavioral science to the adoption challenge, professional firms can transform AI from a peripheral tool into a strategic asset—one that delivers on its promise for people, performance, and purpose.

For organizations seeking to accelerate their AI journey, the message is clear: start with behavior, and the technology will follow.

 Behavior+ AI Series

• Building A More Capable And Wiser AI

Based on the Adopt article from BIT.

Explore our AI services and capabilities at Perficient

If you’re knee-deep in building apps, you already know APIs are the backbone of everything. Testing them? That’s where the real magic happens. For years, we’ve relied on tools like Postman and Insomnia to send requests, debug issues, and keep things running smoothly. But lately, there’s a buzz about something new: Bruno. It’s popping up everywhere, and developers are starting to make the switch. Why? Let’s dive in.

What Exactly is Bruno?

Picture this: an open-source, high-performance API client that puts your privacy first. Bruno isn’t some bloated app that shoves your stuff into the cloud. “No,” it keeps everything right on your local machine. Your API collections, requests, all of it? Safe and sound where you control it, no cloud drama required.

Bruno is built for developers who want:

• Simplicity without compromise
• High performance without unnecessary extras
• Complete freedom with open-source flexibility

It’s like the minimalist toolbox you’ve been waiting for.

Why is Bruno Suddenly Everywhere?

Bruno solves the pain points that frustrate us with other API tools:

• Privacy First: No forced cloud uploads, your collections stay local. No hidden syncing; your data stays completely under your control.
• Fast and Lightweight: Loads quickly and handles requests without lag. Perfect for quick tests on the go.
• Open-Source Freedom: No fees, no lock-in. Collections are Git-friendly and saved as plain text for easy version control.
• No Extra Bloat: Focused on what matters, API testing without unnecessary features.

Bottom line: Bruno fits the way we work today, collaboratively, securely, and efficiently. It’s not trying to do everything; it’s just good at API testing.

Key Features

Bruno keeps it real with features that matter. Here are the highlights:

1. Totally Open-Source

• No sneaky costs or paywalls.
• Peek under the hood anytime—the code’s all there.
• A group of developers is contributing to GitHub, making it better every day. Wanna join? Hit up their repo and contribute.

2. Privacy from the Ground Up

• Everything lives locally.
• No accounts, no cloud pushes—your requests don’t leave your laptop.
• Ideal if you’re handling sensitive APIs and don’t want Big Tool Company snooping.
• Bonus: Those plain-text files integrate well with Git, so team handoffs are seamless.

3. Light as a Feather, Fast as Lightning

• Clean UI, no extra bells and whistles slowing you down.
• Starts up quickly and zips through responses.
• Great for solo endpoint tweaks or managing large workflows without your machine slowing.

Getting Bruno Up and Running

Installing Bruno is simple. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Just choose your platform, and you’re good to go.

#3. Quick Install Guide

Windows

1. Head to Bruno’s GitHub Releases page.
2. Grab the latest .exe file.
3. Run it and follow the prompts.
4. Boom—find it in your Start Menu.

macOS

1. Download the .dmg from Releases.
2. Drag it to Applications.
3. Fire it up and get testing.

Linux

1. Snag the .AppImage or .deb from Releases.
2. For AppImage: chmod +x Bruno.AppImage then ./Bruno.AppImage.
3. For .deb: sudo dpkg -i bruno.deb and sudo apt-get install -f.

GUI or CLI? Your Call

• GUI: Feels like Postman but cleaner. Visual, easy-to-build requests on the fly.
• CLI: For the terminal lovers. Automate tests, integrate with CI/CD, or run collections: bruno run collection.bru –env dev.

Build Your First Collection in Minutes

Bruno makes organizing APIs feel effortless. Here’s a no-sweat walkthrough.

Step 1: Fire It Up

Launch Bruno. You’ll see a simple welcome screen prompting you to create a new collection.

Step 2: New Collection Time

1. Hit “New Collection.”
2. Name it (say, “My API Playground”).
3. Pick a folder—it’s all plain text, so Git loves it.

Step 3: Add a Request

1. Inside the collection, click “New Request.”
2. Pick your method (GET, POST, etc.).
3. Enter the URL: https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts.

Step 4: Headers and Body Magic

• Add the header: Content-Type: application/json.
• For POSTs, add a body like:

JSON

{
"title": "Bruno Blog",
"body": "Testing Bruno API Client",
"userId": 1
}

Step 5: Hit Send

Click it, and watch the response pop: status, timing, pretty JSON—all right there.

Step 6: Save and Sort

Save the request, create folders for environments or APIs, and use variables to switch setups.

Bruno vs. Postman: Head-to-Head

Postman’s the OG, but Bruno’s the scrappy challenger winning hearts. Let’s compare.

1. Speed

• Bruno: Lean and mean—quick loads, low resource hog.
• Postman: Packed with features, but it can feel sluggish on big projects. Edge: Bruno

2. Privacy

• Bruno: Local only, no cloud creep.
• Postman: Syncs to their servers—handy for teams, sketchy for secrets. Edge: Bruno

3. Price Tag

• Bruno: Free forever, open-source vibes.
• Postman: Free basics, but teams and extras? Pay up. Edge: Bruno

Feature	Bruno	Postman
Open Source	Yes	No
Cloud Sync	No	Yes
Performance	Lightweight	Heavy
Privacy	Local Storage	Cloud-Based
Cost	Free	Paid Plans

Level up With Advanced Tricks

Environmental Variables

Swap envs easy-peasy:

• Make files for dev/staging/prod.
• Use {{baseUrl}} in requests.
• Example:

{
"baseUrl": "https://api.dev.example.com",
"token": "your-dev-token"
}

Scripting Smarts

Add pre/post scripts for:

• Dynamic auth: request.headers[“Authorization”] = “Bearer ” + env.token;
• Response checks or automations.

Community & Contribution

It’s community-driven:

• Repo: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno
• Contribute: Fork, branch, PR. Report bugs, chat ideas—help build the future.

Conclusion

Bruno isn’t just another API testing tool; it’s designed for developers who want simplicity and control. With local-first privacy, fast performance, open-source flexibility, and built-in Git support, Bruno delivers everything you need without unnecessary complexity.
If you’re tired of heavy, cloud-based clients, it’s time to switch. Download Bruno today and experience the difference: Download here.

Brainstorming sessions have a love-hate situation. Half the team is excited, the other half dreads it. The truth is, anyone can be creative, but it doesn’t happen by accident – it takes intentionality.

The key is preparation. If people show up cold, they’ll default to routine thinking or recycle old ideas. To break free, our brains need to loosen up first.

After years of leading innovative teams, I’ve learned what works. Here’s a simple game plan to help your team show up ready to think differently and generate fresh ideas together.

Your Job as the Facilitator

Your goal is to make sure the team is ready for what might feel like an unusual process. This isn’t a standard meeting. If your team walks into the same room, sits in the same chairs, sipping the same coffee, they’ll fall into routine and recycle old ideas.

Jumping in cold with, “Now, let’s be creative!” usually leads to either awkward silence or one person dominating the conversation. Neither sparks innovative ideas from the team at large.

Instead, help the team stretch beyond their daily rut. Give them a clear game plan so they arrive ready to think differently and generate ideas that excite everyone.

Week Before: Early Prep

Start the conversation early so people have time to adjust and prepare. Share the problem or opportunity you’ll tackle and why it matters. Encourage participants to jot down initial ideas ahead of time to prime their creative pump and avoid awkward silences for you. If you want, you can ask them to send a few ideas to you ahead of time.

Lay out expectations clearly:

1. Send the agenda so everyone knows what to expect.
2. Focus on idea generation, not debate. Quantity over quality with an “idea factory.”
3. Encourage wild thinking. Suspend reality for a moment, because one impossible idea can spark a feasible one.
4. Set aside ownership. Collaboration is key. Great ideas are evolved, changed, merged.
5. Share inspiration. Send the team an article, video, or data to start the train of thought.
6. Suggest habit shifts. Exercise, meditation, or quiet time can help reset the mind ahead of the session.

Consider a message like:

“Next week we’re going to think differently together. I’m not expecting perfect solutions, but instead want you to arrive with your mind loosened up and ready to play. Here’s how to prepare…”

Day Before: Prime the Mindset

Send a reminder the day before to reinforce excitement and set expectations. If you’ve received early ideas, acknowledge them with enthusiasm and let the team know this is meant to be fun.

Offer quick prep tips:

1. Revisit the “why” of this session. Remind them of the importance of participation.
2. Ask them to avoid distractions in the morning. No early morning emails!
3. Set the tone of the event as judgment-free, experimental, and collaborative. Similar to comedy improv: use “Yes, and…,” “What if…,” or “Could we…?”
4. Emphasize the evolution of ideas and how they grow and change. Building together is the goal.
5. Note that ideas start out rough, but you can polish them. Even the opposite of a good idea can spark another great idea.
6. Suggest breaking their personal routine. Try small disruptions: take a new route to work, wear something unusual, listen to a different music genre. Maybe walk up the stairs backwards.

Consider a message like:

“To prepare your mind for tomorrow, I’m challenging you to break from your norm tonight and tomorrow morning. Try at least two of these suggestions or invent one of your own. Let’s see who finds the weirdest personal disruption!”

Day Of: Set the Stage

First impressions matter. Start the session a little later than usual (we asked them to not hop into work before the session), we want them to arrive fresh. Have the space ready before they walk in.

Make the room feel different:

• Atmosphere: Light background music. A slideshow or posters with creative quotes. Snacks and beverages.
• Seating: Avoid typical conference room setups. Use casual seating or standing tables for comfort and encourage movement throughout the session.
• Tools: Whiteboards, large pads of paper, notebooks, sticky notes, pencils, pens, markers, colored dot stickers for voting, and a screen or projector for references.

The goal here is to signal that this isn’t a typical meeting – it’s a space for creativity.

During the Session

Keep things casual while welcoming everyone as they arrive. Explain why the meeting space looks different and ask if anyone disrupted their morning routine. Be prepared to share your own example if no one chimes in. Keep it light and fun! Aim for laughs, no pressure. Icebreakers work OK, but I prefer a few optical illusions and brain teasers for warming people up.

You should have helpers ready to capture ideas, snap photos of boards, and tally votes. If you use breakout groups, assign a helper to each group.

As facilitator, reiterate the rules:

1. Restate the objective for today. Fresh ideas are needed.
2. No bad ideas. Reviews and debates come later.
3. No competition. Fighting over ownership limits creativity. (Your helpers should keep note of who’s passionate about ideas for follow-up.)
4. Wild ideas are welcome! Spin-off ideas are expected.
5. Quantity over quality. More ideas provide more chances for breakthroughs.
6. Free to move around. Standing, pacing, and changing seats keeps energy up.

Be ready to help if people get stuck:

• Use lateral thinking such as random words, images, or “How would Einstein/Steve Jobs/SpongeBob solve this?”
• Flip the problem by trying the opposite approach or by exaggerating to an illogical extreme.
• Adding constraints can help creativity.
• Use speed rounds. Tight limits often spark creativity. “How many unique ideas can you generate in 5 minutes?”
• You should prepare at least one “crazy idea bomb” to break out of slumps if they happen.

Here’s my example agenda for brainstorming.

Session End

Wrap up on a positive note. Thank everyone for their time and willingness to break out of their routines. Reference a funny idea or moment from the session, if one stood out, trying to end with laughs.

Invite quick reflections:

• What excited or surprised you most today?
• What helped loosen you up?
• What would you want to do again next time?

End with an outline of next steps so the team knows this isn’t the end of the process. Share how ideas will be reviewed, refined, and moved forward.

After: Keep the Momentum

Send a quick follow-up thanking everyone for their time and creativity. Reinforce that this is just the beginning. More to come!

With help from your volunteers, capture all ideas in a shared document, tally votes, and define next steps:

1. Share the summary docs so everyone can reflect.
2. Gather feedback and invite additional thoughts.
3. Assess impact vs. effort for each idea.
4. Engage leadership and sponsors to get buy-in for promising ideas.
5. Consider budget and resources early.
6. Identify project champions. Not idea owners, but people who can move ideas forward and build teams.
7. Create teams around high-potential ideas. Make sure to include those who were passionate about them.
8. Plan follow-up sessions for refinement and move toward official project initiatives.

Conclusion

With a little preparation and clear expectations, you can take brainstorming sessions to the next level. You prime the pump for real creativity when your team understands the goal and the process. Pair these concepts with broader initiatives with North Star Goals.

So rally your team, break the routine, and spark some innovation!

……

If you are looking for a partner in brainstorming, reach out to your Perficient account manager or use our contact form to begin a conversation.

Reflecting on this year’s InsureTech Connect Conference 2025 in Las Vegas, one theme stood out above all others: the insurance industry has crossed a threshold from AI experimentation to AI expectation. With over 9,000 attendees and hundreds of sessions, the world’s largest insurance innovation gathering became a reflection of where the industry stands—and where it’s heading.

What became clear: the carriers pulling ahead aren’t just experimenting with AI—they’re deploying it with intentional discipline. AI is no longer optional, and the leaders are anchoring every investment in measurable business outcomes.

The Shift Is Here: AI in Insurance Moves from Experimentation to Expectation

This transformation isn’t happening in isolation though. Each shift represents a fundamental change in how carriers approach, deploy, and govern AI—and together, they reveal why some insurers are pulling ahead while others struggle to move beyond proof-of-concept.

Here’s what’s driving the separation:

• Agentic AI architectures that move beyond monolithic models to modular, multi-agent systems capable of autonomous reasoning and coordination across claims, underwriting, and customer engagement. Traditional models aren’t just slow—they’re competitive liabilities that can’t deliver the coordinated intelligence modern underwriting demands.
• AI-first strategies that prioritize trust, ethics, and measurable outcomes—especially in underwriting, risk assessment, and customer experience.
• A growing emphasis on data readiness and governance. The brutal reality: carriers are drowning in data while starving for intelligence. Legacy architectures can’t support the velocity AI demands.

Success In Action: Automating Insurance Quotes with Agentic AI

Why Intent Matters: Purpose-Driven AI Delivers Measurable Results

What stood out most this year was the shift from “AI for AI’s sake” to AI with purpose. Working with insurance leaders across every sector, we’ve seen the industry recognize that without clear intent—whether it’s improving claims efficiency, enhancing customer loyalty, or enabling embedded insurance—AI initiatives risk becoming costly distractions.

Conversations with leaders at ITC and other industry events reinforced this urgency. Leaders consistently emphasize that purpose-driven AI must:

• Align with business outcomes. AI enables real-time decisions, sharpens risk modeling, and delivers personalized interactions at scale. The value is undeniable: new-agent success rates increase up to 20%, premium growth boosts by 15%, customer onboarding costs reduce up to 40%.

• Be ethically grounded. Trust is a competitive differentiator—AI governance isn’t compliance theater, it’s market positioning.

• Deliver tangible value to both insurers and policyholders. From underwriting to claims, AI enables real-time decisions, sharpens risk modeling, and delivers personalized interactions at scale. Generative AI accelerates content creation, enables smarter agent support, and transforms customer engagement. Together, these capabilities thrive on modern, cloud-native platforms designed for speed and scalability.

Learn More: Improving CSR Efficiency With a GenAI Assistant

Building the AI-Powered Future: How We’re Accelerating AI in Insurance

So, how do carriers actually build this future? That’s where strategic partnerships and proven frameworks become essential.

At Perficient, we’ve made this our focus. We help clients advance AI capabilities through virtual assistants, generative interfaces, agentic frameworks, and product development, enhancing team velocity by integrating AI team members.

Through our strategic partnerships with industry-leading technology innovators—including AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and more— we accelerate insurance organizations’ ability to modernize infrastructure, integrate data, and deliver intelligent experiences. Together, we shatter boundaries so you have the AI-native solutions you need to boldly advance business.

But technology alone isn’t enough. We take it even further by ensuring responsible AI governance and ethical alignment with our PACE framework—Policies, Advocacy, Controls, and Enablement—to ensure AI is not only innovative, but also rooted in trust. This approach ensures AI is deployed with purpose, aligned to business goals, and embedded with safeguards that protect consumers and organizations.

Because every day your data architecture isn’t AI-ready is a day you’re subsidizing your competitors’ advantage.

You May Also Enjoy: 3 Ways Insurers Can Lead in the Age of AI

Ready to Lead? Partner with Perficient to Accelerate Your AI Transformation

Are you building your AI capabilities at the speed the market demands?

From insight to impact, our insurance expertise helps leaders modernize, personalize, and scale operations. We power AI-first transformation that enhances underwriting, streamlines claims, and builds lasting customer trust.

• Business Transformation: Activate strategy and innovation ​within the insurance ecosystem.​
• Modernization: Optimize technology to boost agility and ​efficiency across the value chain.​
• Data + Analytics: Power insights and accelerate ​underwriting and claims decision-making.​
• Customer Experience: Ease and personalize experiences ​for policyholders and producers.​

We are trusted by leading technology partners and consistently mentioned by analysts. Discover why we have been trusted by 13 of the 20 largest P&C firms and 11 of the 20 largest annuity carriers. Explore our insurance expertise and contact us to learn more.

Financial institutions are at a pivotal moment. As customer expectations evolve and AI reshapes digital engagement, leaders in marketing, CX, and IT must rethink how they deliver value.

Adobe’s report, “State of Customer Experience in Financial Services in an AI-Driven World,” reveals that only 36% of the customer journey is currently personalized, despite 74% of executives acknowledging rising customer expectations. With transformation already underway, financial leaders face five imperatives that demand immediate action to drive relevance, trust, and growth.

1. Make Personalization More Meaningful

Personalization has long been a strategic focus, but today’s consumers expect more than basic segmentation or name-based greetings. They want real-time, omnichannel interactions that align with their financial goals, life stages, and behaviors.

To meet this demand, financial institutions must evolve from reactive personalization to predictive, intent-driven engagement. This means leveraging AI to anticipate needs, orchestrate journeys, and deliver content that resonates with individual context.

Perficient Adobe-consulting principal Ross Monaghan explains, “We are still dealing with disparate data and slow progression into a customer 360 source of truth view to provide effective personalization at scale. What many firms are overlooking is that this isn’t just a data issue. We’re dealing with both a people and process issue where teams need to adjust their operational process of typical campaign waterfall execution to trigger-based and journey personalization.”

His point underscores that personalization challenges go beyond technology. They require cultural and operational shifts to enable real-time, AI-driven engagement.

2. Redesign the Operating Model Around the Customer

Legacy structures often silo marketing, IT, and operations, creating friction in delivering cohesive customer experiences. To compete in a digital-first world, financial institutions must reorient their operating models around the customer, not the org chart.

This shift requires cross-functional collaboration, agile workflows, and shared KPIs that align teams around customer outcomes. It also demands a culture that embraces experimentation and continuous improvement.

Only 3% of financial services firms are structured around the customer journey, though 19% say it should be the ideal.

3. Build Content for AI-Powered Search

As AI-powered search becomes a primary interface for information discovery, the way content is created and structured must change. Traditional SEO strategies are no longer enough.

Customers now expect intelligent, personalized answers over static search results. To stay visible and trusted, financial institutions must create structured, metadata-rich content that performs in AI-powered environments. Content must reflect experience-expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness principles and be both machine-readable and human-relevant. Success depends on building discovery journeys that work across AI interfaces while earning customer confidence in moments that matter.

4. Unify Data and Platforms for Scalable Intelligence

Disconnected data and fragmented platforms limit the ability to generate insights and act on them at scale. To unlock the full potential of AI and automation, financial institutions must unify their data ecosystems.

This means integrating customer, behavioral, transactional, and operational data into a single source of truth that’s accessible across teams and systems. It also involves modernizing MarTech and CX platforms to support real-time decisioning and personalization.

But Ross points out, “Many digital experience and marketing platforms still want to own all data, which is just not realistic, both in reality and cost. The firms that develop their customer source of truth (typically cloud-based data platforms) and signal to other experience or service platforms will be the quickest to marketing execution maturity and success.”

His insight emphasizes that success depends not only on technology integration but also on adopting a federated approach that accelerates marketing execution and operational maturity.

5. Embed Guardrails Into GenAI Execution

As financial institutions explore GenAI use cases, from content generation to customer service automation, governance must be built in from the start. Trust is non-negotiable in financial services, and GenAI introduces new risks around accuracy, bias, and compliance.

Embedding guardrails means establishing clear policies, human-in-the-loop review processes, and robust monitoring systems. It also requires collaboration between legal, compliance, marketing, and IT to ensure responsible innovation.

At Perficient, we use our PACE (Policies, Advocacy, Controls, Enablement) Framework to holistically design tailored operational AI programs that empower business and technical stakeholders to innovate with confidence while mitigating risks and upholding ethical standards.

The Time to Lead is Now

The future of financial services will be defined by how intelligently and responsibly institutions engage in real time. These five imperatives offer a blueprint for action, each one grounded in data, urgency, and opportunity. Leaders who move now will be best positioned to earn trust, drive growth, and lead in the AI-powered era.

Learn About Perficient and Adobe’s Partnership

Are you looking for a partner to help you transform and modernize your technology strategy? Perficient and Adobe bring together deep industry expertise and powerful experience technologies to help financial institutions unify data, orchestrate journeys, and deliver customer-centric experiences that build trust and drive growth.

Get in Touch With Our Experts

The days of measuring marketing success by impressions and engagement are over, especially in financial services. Today, marketing leaders are being asked to do more than build brand awareness. They’re expected to drive top-line growth. 

According to Adobe’s report, “State of Customer Experience in Financial Services in an AI-Driven World,” 90% of financial services marketing leaders say they’re now expected to directly contribute to revenue. And 96% are being asked to become more efficient while doing so. 

This new mandate requires not only a change in metrics but a mindset transformation as well. 

Marketing is Now a Growth Engine

Modern financial institutions are retooling their marketing functions to prioritize: 

• Pipeline creation 

• Product adoption 

• Customer lifetime value

Campaigns are no longer judged by vanity KPIs. Success is measured by conversion lift, wallet share, and ROI. That means marketing must operate with the same precision and accountability as sales and finance. 

Performance-Driven Marketing Requires New Infrastructure

To meet these expectations, marketing teams need: 

• Attribution models that tie spend to outcomes 

• Automation platforms that enable real-time optimization 

• Journey tracking that connects every touchpoint to business impact 

Along with the right tools, financial services marketers will also need to build a culture of continuous improvement and commercial fluency. 

Business Fluency is the New Financial Services Marketing Skillset

To lead in this environment, marketers must speak the language of finance. That means understanding: 

• Unit economics 

• Acquisition cost 

• Profitability metrics 

Winning teams are breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and product to drive aligned, data-informed execution. Financial services marketing is moving beyond a support function to a strategic partner in growth. 

Precision, Accountability, and Impact

By embracing data-driven strategies, building the right infrastructure, and fostering commercial fluency, marketing teams can move from a support function to a strategic driver of revenue. The organizations that succeed will be those that align marketing with business outcomes and lead with precision, accountability, and agility. 

Download the full Adobe report to learn more about the top insights shaping financial services marketing and the industry as a whole. 

How Perficient and Adobe Help Financial Services Marketers Lead

We help financial services firms modernize their marketing operations from journey orchestration to performance measurement. Together with Adobe, we’re enabling marketing teams to become growth architects, not just brand custodians. 

Let’s connect and uncover new ways to drive measurable impact together.

What developers need to know about the architectural changes that launched on November 10th

Last week at Sitecore Symposium 2025 was one of those rare industry events that reminded me why this community is so special. I got to reconnect with former colleagues I hadn’t seen in years, finally meet current team members face-to-face who had only been voices on video calls, and form genuine new relationships with peers across the ecosystem. Beyond the professional connections, we spent time with current customers and had fascinating conversations with potential new ones about their challenges and aspirations. And let’s be honest—the epic Universal Studios party that capped off the event didn’t hurt either.

Now that we’re settling back into routine work, it’s time to unpack everything that was announced. The best part? As of today, November 10th, it’s all live. When you log into the platform, you can see and experience everything that was demonstrated on stage.

After a decade of Sitecore development, I’ve learned to separate marketing announcements from actual technical changes. This one’s different: SitecoreAI represents a genuine architectural shift toward AI-first design that changes how we approach development.

Here’s what developers need to know about the platform evolution that launched today.

Architecture Changes That Matter

Cloud-Native Foundation with New Deployment Model

SitecoreAI maintains XM Cloud’s Azure-hosted foundation while introducing four connected environments:

• Agentic Studio – where marketers and AI collaborate to plan, create, and personalize experiences
• App Studio – dedicated space for custom application development
• Sitecore Connect – for integrations
• Marketplace – for sharing and discovering solutions

If you’re already on XM Cloud, your existing implementations transition without breaking changes. That’s genuinely good news—no major refactoring required. The platform adds enhanced governance with enterprise deployment controls without sacrificing the SaaS agility we’ve come to expect. There’s also a dedicated App Studio environment specifically for custom application development.

The entire platform is API-first, with RESTful APIs for all platform functions, including AI agent interaction. The key difference from traditional on-premises complexity is that you get cloud-native scaling with enterprise-grade governance built right in.

Unified Architecture vs. Integration Complexity

The biggest architectural change is having unified content, customer data, personalization, and AI in a single platform. This fundamentally changes how we think about integrations.

Instead of connecting separate CMS, CDP, personalization, and AI tools, everything operates within one data model. Your external system integrations change from multi-platform orchestration to single API framework connections. There are trade-offs here—you gain architectural simplicity but need to evaluate vendor lock-in versus best-of-breed flexibility for your specific requirements.

The Development Paradigm Shift: AI Agents

The most significant change for developers is the introduction of autonomous AI agents as a platform primitive. They’ve gone ahead and built this functionality right into the platform, so we’re not trying to bolt it on as an addon. This feels like it’s going to be big.

What AI Agents Mean for Developers

AI agents operate within the platform to handle marketing workflows autonomously—content generation, A/B testing, personalization optimization. They’re not replacing custom code; they’re handling repeatable marketing tasks.

As developers, our responsibilities shift to designing the underlying data models that agents consume, creating integration patterns for agent-external system interactions, building governance frameworks that define agent operational boundaries, and handling complex customizations that exceed agent capabilities.

Marketers can configure basic agents without developer involvement, but custom data models, security frameworks, and complex integrations still require development expertise. So our role evolves rather than disappears.

New Skillset Requirements

Working with AI agents requires understanding several new concepts. You need to know how to design secure, compliant boundaries for agent operations and governed AI frameworks. You’ll also need to structure data so agents can operate effectively, understand how agents learn and improve from configuration and usage, and know when to use agents versus traditional custom development.

This combines traditional technical architecture with AI workflow design.  A new skillset that bridges development and intelligent automation.

Migration Path from XM Cloud

What “Seamless Transition” Actually Means

For XM Cloud customers, the upgrade path is genuinely straightforward. There are no breaking changes.  Existing customizations, integrations, and content work without modification. AI capabilities layer on top of current functionality, and the transition can happen immediately.  When you log in today it’ll all be there waiting for you, no actions needed.

Legacy Platform Migrations

For developers migrating from older Sitecore implementations or other platforms, SitecoreAI provides SitecoreAI Pathway tooling that claims 70% faster migration timelines. The tooling includes automated content conversion with intelligent mapping of existing content structures, schema translation with automated data model conversion and manual review points, and workflow recreation tools to either replicate existing processes or redesign them with AI agent capabilities.

Migration Planning Approach

Based on what I’ve seen, successful migrations follow a clear pattern. Start with an assessment phase to catalog existing customizations, integrations, and workflows. Then make strategy decisions about whether to replicate each component exactly or reimagine it with AI agents. Use a phased implementation that starts with core functionality and gradually add AI-enhanced workflows. Don’t forget team training to educate developers on agent architecture and governance patterns.

The key architectural question becomes: which processes should remain as traditional custom code versus be reimagined as AI agent workflows?

Integration Strategy Considerations

API Framework and Connectivity

SitecoreAI’s unified architecture changes integration patterns significantly. You get native ecosystem integration with direct connectivity to Sitecore XP, Search, CDP, and Personalize without separate integration layers. Third-party integration happens through a single API framework with webhook support for real-time external system connectivity. Authentication is unified across all platform functions.

Data Flow Changes

The unified customer data model affects how you architect integrations. You now have a single customer profile across content, behavior, and AI operations. Real-time data synchronization happens without ETL complexity, and there’s centralized data governance for AI agent operations.

One important note: existing integrations that rely on separate CDP or personalization APIs may need updates to leverage the unified data model.

What This Means for Your Development Team

Immediate Action Items

If you’re currently on XM Cloud, start by documenting your existing custom components for compatibility assessment. Review your integrations to evaluate which external system connections could benefit from unified architecture. Look for repetitive marketing workflows that could be handled by agents.

If you’re planning a migration, use this as an opportunity to modernize rather than just lift-and-shift. Evaluate whether SitecoreAI Pathway’s claimed time savings match your migration complexity. Factor in the learning curve for AI agent architecture when planning team skills development.

Skills to Develop

You’ll want to focus on AI workflow design and understand how to structure processes for agent automation. Learn about building secure, compliant boundaries for autonomous operations. Get comfortable designing for a single customer data model versus traditional integration patterns. Become proficient working in the five-environment Studio model.

Developer’s Bottom Line

For XM Cloud developers, this is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Your existing skills remain relevant while the platform adds AI agent capabilities that reduce routine customization work.

For legacy Sitecore developers, the migration path provides an opportunity to modernize architecture while gaining AI automation capabilities but requires learning cloud-native development patterns.

The strategic shift is clear: development work shifts from building everything custom to designing frameworks where AI agents can operate effectively. You’re architecting for intelligent automation, not just content management.

The platform launched today. For developers, the key question isn’t whether AI will change digital platforms, it’s whether you want to learn agent-based architecture now or catch up later.  The future is here and I’m for it.

Coming Up: I’ll be writing follow-up posts on AI agent development patterns, integration architecture deep dives, and migration playbooks.

In today’s AI activated world, there are ample number of AI related tools that organizations can use to tackle diverse business challenges. In line with this, Amazon has it’s set of Amazon Web Services for AI and ML, to address the real-world needs.

This blog provides details on AWS services, but by understanding this writeup you can also get to know how AI and ML capabilities can be used to address various business challenges. To illustrate how these services can be leveraged, I have used a few simple and straightforward use cases and mapped the AWS solutions to them.

AI Use Cases : Using AWS Services

1. Employee On boarding process

Any employee onboarding process has its own challenges which can be improved by better information discovery, shortening the onboarding timelines, providing more flexibility to the new hire, option for learning and re-visiting the learning multiple times and enhancing both the security and personalization of the induction experience.

Using natural language queries, the AWS AI service – Amazon Kendra, enables new hires to easily find HR manuals, IT instructions, leave policies, and company guidelines, without needing to know exact file names or bookmark multiple URLs.

Amazon Kendra uses Semantic Search which understands the user’s intent and contextual meaning. Semantic search relies on Vector embeddings, Vector search, Pattern matching and Natural Language Processing.

Real-time data retrieval through Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) in Amazon Kendra empowers employees to access up-to-date content securely and efficiently.

Following are examples of few prompts a new hire can use to retrieve information:

• How can I access my email on my laptop and on my phone.
• How do I contact the IT support.
• How can I apply for a leave and who do I reach out to for approvals.
• How do I submit my timesheet.
• Where can I find the company training portal.
• ….etcetera.

Data Security

To protect organizational data and ensure compliance with enterprise security standards, Amazon Kendra supports robust data security measures, including encryption in transit and at rest, and seamless integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Role-based access ensures that sensitive information is only visible to authorized personnel.

Thus, in the Onboarding process, the HR team can provide the personalized touch, and the AI agent ensures the employees have easy, anytime access to the right information throughout their on-boarding journey.

.

2. Healthcare: Unlocking Insights from Unstructured Clinical Data

Healthcare providers always need to extract critical patient information and support timely decision-making. They face the challenge of rapidly analyzing vast amounts of unstructured medical records, such as physician notes, discharge summaries, and clinical reports.

From a data perspective two key features are required, namely, Entity Recognition and Attribute detection. Medical entities include symptoms, medications, diagnoses, and treatment plans. Similarly Attribute detection includes identifying the dosage, frequency and severity associated with these entities.

Amazon provides the service, Amazon Comprehend Medical which uses NLP and ML models for extracting such information from unstructured data available with healthcare organizations.

One of the crucial aspects in healthcare is to handle Security and compliance related to patient’s health data. AWS has Amazon Macie as a security related service which employs machine learning & pattern matching to discover, classify, and protect Protected Health Information (PHI) within Amazon S3 bucket. Such a service helps organizations maintain HIPAA compliance through automated data governance.

3. Enterprise data insights

Any large enterprise has data spread across various tools like SharePoint, Salesforce, Leave management portals or some accounting applications.

From these data sets, executives can extract great insights, evaluate what-if scenarios, check on some key performance indicators, and utilize all this for decision making.

We can use AWS AI service, Amazon Q business for this very purpose using various plugins, connectors to DBs, and Retrieval Augmented Generation for up-to-date information.

The user can use natural language to query the system and Amazon Q performs Semantic search to return back contextually appropriate information. It also uses Knowledge Grounding which eventually helps in providing accurate answers not relying solely on training data sets.

To ensure that AI-generated responses adhere strictly to approved enterprise protocols, provide accurate and relevant information, we can define built-in guardrails within Amazon Q, such as Global Controls and Topic blocking.

4. Retail company use cases

a) Reading receipts and invoices

The company wants to automate the financial auditing process. In order to achieve this we can use Amazon Textract to read receipts and invoices as it uses machine learning algorithms to accurately identify and extract key information like product names, prices, and reviews.

b) Analyse customer purchasing patterns

The company intends to analyse customer purchasing patterns to predict future sales trends from their large datasets of historical sales data. For these analyses the company wants to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and efficiently.

Amazon SageMaker is the ideal service for such a development.

c) Customer support Bot

The firm receives thousands of customer calls daily. In order to smoothen the process, the firm is looking to create a conversational AI bot which can take text inputs and voice commands.

We can use Amazon Bedrock to create a custom AI application from a dataset of ready to use Foundation models. These models can process large volumes of customer data, generate personalized responses and integrate with other AWS services like Amazon SageMaker for additional processing and analytics.

We can use Amazon Lex to create the bot, and Amazon Polly for text to speech purposes.

d) Image analyses

The company might want to identify and categorize their products based on the images uploaded. To implement this, we can use Amazon S3 and Amazon Rekognition to analyze images as soon as the new product image is uploaded into the storage service.

AWS Services for Compliance & Regulations

AWS Services for Compliance & Regulations

In order to manage complex customer requirements and handling large volumes of sensitive data it becomes essential for us to adhere to various regulations.

Key AWS services supporting these compliance and governance needs include:

1. AWS Config
   Continuously monitors and records resource configurations to help assess compliance.
2. AWS Artifact
   Centralized repository for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and agreements.
3. AWS CloudTrail
   Logs and tracks all user activity and API calls within your AWS environment for audit purposes.
4. AWS Inspector
   Automated security assessment service that identifies vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices.
5. AWS Audit Manager
   Simplifies audit preparation by automating evidence collection and compliance reporting.
6. AWS Trusted Advisor
   Provides real-time recommendations to optimize security, performance, and cost efficiency.

Security and Privacy risks: Vulnerabilities in LLMs

Vulnerabilities in LLMs

While dealing with LLMs there are ways available to attack the prompts, however there are various safeguards also against them. Keeping in view the attacks I am noting down some vulnerabilities which are useful to understand the risks around your LLMs.

Can you co-relate the above use cases with any of your challenges at hand? Have you been able to use any of the AWS services or other AI platforms for dealing with such challenges?

References:

https://aws.amazon.com/ai/services/
https://www.udemy.com/share/10bvuD/

In my previous blogs, I outlined key considerations for planning a Sitecore migration and shared strategies for executing it effectively. The next critical step is to understand how your business and technical requirements align with the broader Sitecore ecosystem.
Before providing careful recommendations to a customer, it’s essential to map your goals—content management, personalization, multi-site delivery, analytics, and future scalability onto Sitecore’s composable and cloud-native offerings. This ensures that migration and implementation decisions are not only feasible but optimized for long-term value.
To revisit the foundational steps and execution strategies, check out these two helpful resources:
•  Planning Sitecore Migration: Things to Consider
•  Executing a Sitecore Migration: Development, Performance, and Beyond

Sitecore is not just a CMS; it’s a comprehensive digital experience platform.
Before making recommendations to a customer, it’s crucial to clearly define what is truly needed and to have a deep understanding of how powerful Sitecore is. Its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) capabilities, including personalization, marketing automation, and analytics—combined with cloud-native SaaS delivery, enable organizations to scale efficiently, innovate rapidly, and deliver highly engaging digital experiences.
By carefully aligning customer requirements with these capabilities, you can design solutions that not only meet technical and business needs but also maximize ROI, streamline operations, and deliver long-term value.

In this blog, I’ll summarize Sitecore’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) offerings to explore how each can be effectively utilized to meet evolving business and technical needs.

1. Sitecore XM Cloud

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) is a cloud-native, SaaS, hybrid headless CMS designed to help businesses create and deliver personalized, multi-channel digital experiences across websites and applications. It combines the flexibility of modern headless architecture with robust authoring tools, enabling teams to strike a balance between developer agility and marketer control.

Key Capabilities

• Cloud-native: XM Cloud is built for the cloud, providing a secure, reliable, scalable, and enterprise-ready system. Its architecture ensures high availability and global reach without the complexity of traditional on-premises systems.
• SaaS Delivery: Sitecore hosts, maintains, and updates XM Cloud regularly. Organizations benefit from automatic updates, new features, and security enhancements without the need for costly installations or manual upgrades. This ensures that teams always work with the latest technologies while reducing operational overhead.
• Hybrid Headless: XM Cloud separates content and presentation, enabling developers to build custom front-end experiences using modern frameworks, while marketers utilize visual editing tools like the Page Builder to make real-time changes. This allows routine updates to be handled without developer intervention, maintaining speed and agility.
• Developer Productivity: Developers can model content with data templates, design reusable components, and assign content through data sources. Sitecore offers SDKs like the Content SDK for building personalized Next.js apps, the ASP.NET Core SDK for .NET integrations, and the Cloud SDK for extending DXP capabilities into Content SDK and JSS applications connected to XM Cloud. Starter kits are provided for setting up the code base.
• Global Content Delivery: With Experience Edge, XM Cloud provides scalable GraphQL endpoints to deliver content rapidly across geographies, ensuring consistent user experiences worldwide.
• Extensibility & AI Integration: XM Cloud integrates with apps from the Sitecore Marketplace and leverages Sitecore Stream for advanced AI-powered content generation and optimization. This accelerates content creation while maintaining brand consistency.
• Continuous Updates & Security: XM Cloud includes multiple interfaces, such as Portal, Deploy, Page Builder, Explorer, Forms, and Analytics, which are regularly updated. Deploy app to deploy to XM Cloud projects.

XM Cloud is ideal for organizations seeking a scalable, flexible, and future-proof content platform, allowing teams to focus on delivering compelling digital experiences rather than managing infrastructure.

2. Experience Platform (XP)

Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is like an all-in-one powerhouse—it’s a complete box packed with everything you need for delivering personalized, data-driven digital experiences. While Experience Management (XM) handles content delivery, XP adds layers of personalization, marketing automation, and deep analytics, ensuring every interaction is contextually relevant and optimized for each visitor.

Key Capabilities

• Content Creation & Management: The Content Editor and Experience Editor allow marketers and content authors to create, structure, and manage website content efficiently, supporting collaboration across teams.
• Digital Marketing Tools: Built-in marketing tools enable the creation and management of campaigns, automating triggers and workflows to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels.
• Experience Analytics: XP provides detailed insights into website performance, visitor behavior, and campaign effectiveness. This includes metrics like page performance, conversions, and user engagement patterns.
• Experience Optimization: Using analytics data, XP allows you to refine content and campaigns to achieve better results. A/B testing and multivariate testing help determine the most effective variations.
• Path Analyzer: This tool enables you to analyze how visitors navigate through your site, helping you identify bottlenecks, drop-offs, and opportunities to enhance the user experience.
  By combining these capabilities, XP bridges content and marketing intelligence, enabling teams to deliver data-driven, personalized experiences while continuously refining and improving digital engagement.

By combining these capabilities, XP bridges content and marketing intelligence, enabling teams to deliver data-driven, personalized experiences while continuously refining and improving digital engagement.

3. Sitecore Content Hub

Sitecore Content Hub unifies content planning, creation, curation, and asset management into a single platform, enabling teams to collaborate efficiently and maintain control across the entire content lifecycle and digital channels.

Key Capabilities

• Digital Asset Management (DAM): Content Hub organizes and manages images, videos, documents, and other digital assets. Assets can be tagged, annotated, searched, and shared efficiently, supporting teams in building engaging experiences without losing control over asset usage or consistency.
• Campaign & Content Planning: Teams can plan campaigns, manage editorial calendars, and assign tasks to ensure smooth collaboration between marketing, creative, and operational teams. Structured workflows enforce version control, approvals, and accountability, ensuring that content moves systematically to the end user.
• AI-Powered Enhancements: Advanced AI capabilities accelerate content operations. These intelligent features reduce manual effort, increase productivity, and help teams maintain brand consistency at scale.
• Microservice Architecture & Integration & Multi-Channel Delivery: Content Hub is built on a microservice-based architecture, allowing flexible integration with external systems, headless CMS, and cloud development pipelines. Developers can extend capabilities or connect Content Hub to other platforms without disrupting core operations. Content Hub ensures that teams can deliver consistent, high-quality experiences across websites, social media, commerce, and other digital channels.

Sitecore Content Hub empowers organizations to manage content as a strategic asset, streamlining operations, enabling global collaboration, and providing the technical flexibility developers need to build integrated, scalable solutions.

strong>4. Sitecore Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Sitecore Customer Data Platform (CDP) enables organizations to collect customer data across all digital channels, providing a single, unified view of every user. By centralizing behavioral and transactional data, CDP allows businesses to deliver personalized experiences and data-driven marketing at scale.

Key Capabilities

• Real-Time Data Collection: The Stream API captures live behavioral and transactional data from your applications and sends it to Sitecore CDP in real time. This ensures that customer profiles are always up-to-date and that personalization can be applied dynamically as users interact with your digital properties.
• Batch Data Upload: For larger datasets, including guest data or offline orders, the Batch API efficiently uploads bulk information into CDP, keeping your customer data repository comprehensive and synchronized.
• CRUD Operations: Sitecore CDP offers REST APIs for retrieving, creating, updating, and deleting customer data. This enables developers to integrate external systems, enrich profiles, or synchronize data between multiple platforms with ease.
• Data Lake Export: With the Data Lake Export Service, all organizational data can be accessed from Amazon S3, allowing it to be downloaded locally or transferred to another S3 bucket for analysis, reporting, or integration with external systems.
• SDK Integrations (Cloud SDK & Engage SDK): Developers can leverage Sitecore’s Cloud SDK and Engage SDK to streamline data collection, manage user information, and integrate CDP capabilities directly into applications. These SDKs simplify the process of connecting applications to XM Cloud and other services to CDP, enabling real-time engagement and seamless data synchronization.

Sitecore CDP captures behavioral and transactional interactions across channels, creating a unified, real-time profile for each customer. These profiles can be used for advanced segmentation, targeting, and personalization, which in turn informs marketing strategies and customer engagement initiatives.
By integrating CDP with other components of the Sitecore ecosystem—such as DXP, XM Cloud, and Content Hub —organizations can efficiently orchestrate personalized, data-driven experiences across websites, apps, and other digital touchpoints.

5. Sitecore Personalize

Sitecore Personalize enables organizations to deliver seamless, consistent, and highly relevant experiences across websites, mobile apps, and other digital channels. By leveraging real-time customer data, predictive insights, and AI-driven decisioning, it ensures that the right content, offers, and messages get delivered to the target customer/audience.

Key Capabilities

• Personalized Experiences: Deliver tailored content and offers based on real-time user behavior, predictive analytics, and unified customer profiles. Personalization can be applied across web interactions, server-side experiences, and triggered channels, such as email or SMS, ensuring every interaction is timely and relevant.
• Testing and Optimization: Conduct A/B/n tests and evaluate which variations perform best based on actual customer behavior. This enables continuous optimization of content, campaigns, and personalization strategies.
• Performance Analytics: Track user interactions and measure campaign outcomes to gain actionable insights. Analytics support data-driven refinement of personalization, ensuring experiences remain effective and relevant.
• Experiences and Experiments: Helps to create a tailored experience for each user depending on interaction and any other relevant user data.
• AI-Driven Assistance: The built-in Code Assistant can turn natural language prompts into JavaScript, allowing developers to quickly create custom conditions, session traits, and programmable personalization scenarios without writing code from scratch.

By combining real-time data from CDP, content from XM Cloud and Content Hub, and AI-driven decisioning, Sitecore Personalize allows organizations to orchestrate truly unified, intelligent, and adaptive customer experiences. This empowers marketers and developers to respond dynamically to signals, test strategies, and deliver interactions that drive engagement and value, along with a unique experience for users.

6. Sitecore Send

Sitecore Send is a cloud-based email marketing platform that enables organizations to create, manage, and optimize email campaigns. By combining automation, advanced analytics, and AI-driven capabilities, marketing teams can design, execute, and optimize email campaigns efficiently without relying heavily on IT support.

Key Capabilities

• Campaign Creation & Management: Sitecore Send offers a no-code campaign editor that enables users to design campaigns through drag-and-drop and pre-built templates. Marketers can create campaigns quickly, trigger messages automatically, and also perform batch sends.
• A/B Testing & Optimization: Campaigns can be A/B tested to determine which version resonates best with the target audience, helping improve open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement.
• AI-Powered Insights: Built-in AI capabilities help optimize send times, segment audiences, and predict engagement trends, ensuring messages are timely, relevant, and impactful.
• API Integration: The Sitecore Send API enables developers to integrate email marketing functionality directly into applications. It supports tasks such as:
  • Creating and managing email lists
  • Sending campaigns programmatically
  • Retrieving real-time analytics
  • Automating repetitive tasks
  • This API-driven approach allows teams to streamline operations, accelerate campaign delivery, and leverage programmatic control over their marketing initiatives.

Sitecore Send integrates seamlessly with the broader Sitecore ecosystem, using real-time data from CDP and leveraging content from XM Cloud or Content Hub. Combined with personalization capabilities, it ensures that email communications are targeted, dynamic, and aligned with overall customer experience strategies.
By centralizing email marketing and providing programmatic access, Sitecore Send empowers organizations to deliver scalable, data-driven campaigns while maintaining full control over creative execution and performance tracking.

7. Sitecore Search

Sitecore Search is a headless search and discovery platform that delivers fast, relevant, and personalized results across content and products. It enables organizations to create predictive, AI-powered, intent-driven experiences that drive engagement, conversions, and deeper customer insights.

Key Capabilities

• Personalized Search & Recommendations: Uses visitor interaction tracking and AI/ML algorithms to deliver tailored search results and product/content recommendations in real time.
• Headless Architecture: Decouples search and discovery from presentation, enabling seamless integration across websites, apps, and other digital channels.
• Analytics & Optimization: Provides rich insights into visitor behavior, search performance, and business impact, allowing continuous improvement of search relevance and engagement.
• AI & Machine Learning Core: Sophisticated algorithms analyze large datasets—including visitor location, preferences, interactions, and purchase history to deliver predictive, personalized experiences.

With Sitecore Search, organizations can provide highly relevant, omnichannel experiences powered by AI-driven insights and advanced analytics.

8. Sitecore Discover

Sitecore Discover is an AI-driven product search similar to sitecore search, but this is more product and commerce-centric. It enables merchandisers and marketers to deliver personalized shopping experiences across websites and apps. By tracking user interactions, it generates targeted recommendations using AI recipes, such as similar products and items bought together, which helps increase engagement and conversions. Merchandisers can configure pages and widgets via the Customer Engagement Console (CEC) to create tailored, data-driven experiences without developer intervention.

Search vs. Discover

• Sitecore Search: Broad content/product discovery, developer-driven, AI/ML-powered relevance, ideal for general omnichannel search. Optimized for content and product discovery.
• Sitecore Discover: Commerce-focused product recommendations, merchandiser-controlled, AI-driven personalization for buying experiences. Optimized for commerce personalization and merchandising.

9. Sitecore Connect

Sitecore Connect is an integration tool that enables seamless connections between Sitecore products and other applications in your ecosystem, creating end-to-end, connected experiences for websites and users.

Key Capabilities

• Architecture: Built around recipes and connectors, Sitecore Connect offers a flexible and scalable framework for integrations.
• Recipes: Automated workflows that define triggers (events occurring in applications) and actions (tasks executed when specific events occur), enabling process automation across systems.
• Connectors: Manage connectivity and interactivity between applications, enabling seamless data exchange and coordinated workflows without requiring complex custom coding.

With Sitecore Connect, organizations can orchestrate cross-system processes, synchronize data, and deliver seamless experiences across digital touchpoints, all while reducing manual effort and integration complexity.

10. OrderCloud

OrderCloud is a cloud-based, API-first, headless commerce and marketplace platform designed for B2B, B2C, and B2X scenarios. It provides a flexible, scalable, and fully customizable eCommerce architecture that supports complex business models and distributed operations.

Key Capabilities

• Headless & API-First: Acts as the backbone of commerce operations, allowing businesses to build and connect multiple experiences such as buyer storefronts, supplier portals, or admin dashboards—on top of a single commerce platform.
• Customizable Commerce Solutions: Supports large and complex workflows beyond traditional shopping carts, enabling tailored solutions for distributed organizations.
• Marketplace & Supply Chain Support: Facilitates selling across extended networks, including suppliers, franchises, and partners, while centralizing order management and commerce operations.

OrderCloud empowers organizations to scale commerce operations, extend digital selling capabilities, and create fully customized eCommerce experiences, all while leveraging a modern, API-first headless architecture.

Final Thoughts

Sitecore’s composable DXP products and its suite of SDKs empower organizations to build scalable, personalized, and future-ready digital experiences. By understanding how each component fits into your architecture and aligns with your  business goals, you can make informed decisions that drive long-term value. Whether you’re modernizing legacy systems or starting fresh in the cloud, aligning your strategy with Sitecore’s capabilities ensures a smoother migration and a more impactful digital transformation.

In previous blog, the strategic and architectural considerations that set the foundation for a successful Sitecore migration is explored. Once the groundwork is ready, it’s time to move from planning to execution, where the real complexity begins. The development phase of a Sitecore migration demands precision, speed, and scalability. From choosing the right development environment and branching strategy to optimizing templates, caching, and performance, every decision directly impacts the stability and maintainability of your new platform.

This blog dives into the practical side of migration, covering setup best practices, developer tooling (IDE and CI/CD), coding standards, content model alignment, and performance tuning techniques to help ensure that your transition to Sitecore’s modern architecture is both seamless and future-ready.Title (suggested): Executing a Successful Sitecore Migration: Development, Performance, and Beyond

1. Component and Code Standards Over Blind Reuse

• In any Sitecore migration, one of the biggest mistakes teams make is lifting and shifting old components into the new environment. While this may feel faster in the short term, it creates long-term problems.
• Missed product offerings: Old components were often built around constraints of an earlier Sitecore version. Reusing them as-is means you can’t take advantage of new product features like improved personalization, headless capabilities, SaaS integrations, and modern analytics.
• Outdated standards: Legacy code usually does not meet current coding, security, and performance standards. This can introduce vulnerabilities and inefficiencies into your new platform.
  Accessibility gaps: Many older components don’t align with WCAG and ADA accessibility standards — missing ARIA roles, semantic HTML, or proper alt text. Reusing them will carry accessibility debt into your fresh build.
• Maintainability issues: Old code often has tight coupling, minimal test coverage, and obsolete dependencies. Keeping it will slow down future upgrades and maintenance.

Best practice: Treat the migration as an opportunity to raise your standards. Audit old components for patterns and ideas, but don’t copy-paste them. Rebuild them using modern frameworks, Sitecore best practices, security guidelines, and accessibility compliance. This ensures the new solution is future-proof and aligned with the latest Sitecore roadmap.

2. Template Creation and Best Practices

• Templates define the foundation of your content structure, so designing them carefully is critical.
• Analyze before creating: Study existing data models, pages, and business requirements before building templates.
• Use base templates: Group common fields (e.g., Meta, SEO, audit info) into base templates and reuse them across multiple content types.
• Leverage branch templates: Standardize complex structures (like a landing page with modules) by creating branch templates for consistency and speed.
• Follow naming and hierarchy conventions: Clear naming and logical organization make maintenance much easier.

3. Development Practices and Tools

A clean, standards-driven development process ensures the migration is efficient, maintainable, and future-proof. It’s not just about using the right IDEs but also about building code that is consistent, compliant, and friendly for content authors.

• IDEs & Tools
  • Use Visual Studio or VS Code with Sitecore- and frontend-specific extensions for productivity.
  • Set up linting, code analysis, and formatting tools (ESLint, Prettier in case of JSS code, StyleCop) to enforce consistency.
  • Use AI assistance (GitHub Copilot, Codeium, etc.) to speed up development, but always review outputs for compliance and quality. There are many different AI tools available in market that can even change the design/prototypes into specified code language.

• Coding Standards & Governance
  • Follow SOLID principles and keep components modular and reusable.
  • Ensure secure coding standards: sanitize inputs, validate data, avoid secrets in code.
  • Write accessible code: semantic HTML, proper ARIA roles, alt text, and keyboard navigation.
  • Document best practices and enforce them with pull request reviews and automated checks.

• Package & Dependency Management
  • Select npm/.NET packages carefully: prefer well-maintained, community-backed, and security-reviewed ones.
  • Avoid large, unnecessary dependencies that bloat the project.
  • Run dependency scanning tools to catch vulnerabilities.
  •  Keep lockfiles for environment consistency.

• Rendering Variants & Parameters
  • Leverage rendering variants (SXA/headless) to give flexibility without requiring code changes.
  • Add parameters so content authors can adjust layouts, backgrounds, or alignment safely.
  • Always provide sensible defaults to protect design consistency.

• Content Author Experience

Build with the content author in mind:

• • Use clear, meaningful field names and help text.
  • Avoid unnecessary complexity: fewer, well-designed fields are better.
  • Create modular components that authors can configure and reuse.
  • Validate with content author UAT to ensure the system is intuitive for day-to-day content updates.

Strong development practices not only speed up migration but also set the stage for easier maintenance, happier authors, and a longer-lasting Sitecore solution.

4. Data Migration & Validation

Migrating data is not just about “moving items.” It’s about translating old content into a new structure that aligns with modern Sitecore best practices.

• Migration tools
  Sitecore does provides migration tools to shift data like XM to XM Cloud. Leverage these tools for data that needs to be copied.
• PowerShell for Migration
  • Use Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) to script the migration of data from the old system that does not need to be as is but in different places and field from old system.
  • Automate bulk operations like item creation, field population, media linking, and handling of multiple language versions.
  • PowerShell scripts can be run iteratively, making them ideal as content continues to change during development.
  • Always include logging and reporting so migrated items can be tracked, validated, and corrected if needed.

• Migration Best Practices

• • Field Mapping First: Analyze old templates and decide what maps directly, what needs transformation, and what should be deprecated.
  • Iterative Migration: Run migration scripts in stages, validate results, and refine before final cutover.
  • Content Cleanup: Remove outdated, duplicate, or unused content instead of carrying it forward.
  • SEO Awareness: Ensure titles, descriptions, alt text, and canonical fields are migrated correctly.
  • Audit & Validation:
    • Use PowerShell reports to check item counts, empty fields, or broken links.
    • Crawl both old and new sites with tools like Screaming Frog to compare URLs, metadata, and page structures.

5. SEO Data Handling

SEO is one of the most critical success factors in any migration — if it’s missed, rankings and traffic can drop overnight.

• Metadata: Preserve titles, descriptions, alt text, and Open Graph tags. Missing these leads to immediate SEO losses.
• Redirects: Map old URLs with 301 redirects (avoid chains). Broken redirects = lost link equity.
• Structured Data: Add/update schema (FAQ, Product, Article, VideoObject). This improves visibility in SERPs and AI-generated results.
• Core Web Vitals: Ensure the new site is fast, stable, and mobile-first. Poor performance = lower rankings.
• Emerging SEO: Optimize for AI/Answer Engine results, focus on E-E-A-T (author, trust, freshness), and create natural Q&A content for voice/conversational search.
• Validation: Crawl the site before and after migration with tools like Screaming Frog or Siteimprove to confirm nothing is missed.

Strong SEO handling ensures the new Sitecore build doesn’t just look modern — it retains rankings, grows traffic, and is ready for AI-powered search.

6. Serialization & Item Deployment

Serialization is at the heart of a smooth migration and ongoing Sitecore development. Without the right approach, environments drift, unexpected items get deployed, or critical templates are missed.

• Best Practices
  • Choose the Right Tool: Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS), Unicorn, or TDS — select based on your project needs.
  • Scope Carefully: Serialize only what is required (templates, renderings, branches, base content). Avoid unnecessary content items.
  • Organize by Modules: Structure serialization so items are grouped logically (feature, foundation, project layers). This keeps deployments clean and modular.
  • Version Control: Store serialization files in source control (Git/Azure devops) to track changes and allow safe rollbacks.
  • Environment Consistency: Automate deployment pipelines so serialized items are promoted consistently from dev → QA → UAT → Prod.
  • Validation: Always test deployments in lower environments first to ensure no accidental overwrites or missing dependencies.

Properly managed serialization ensures clean deployments, consistent environments, and fewer surprises during migration and beyond.

7. Forms & Submissions

In Sitecore XM Cloud, forms require careful planning to ensure smooth data capture and migration.

•  XM Cloud Forms (Webhook-based): Submit form data via webhooks to CRM, backend, or marketing platforms. Configure payloads properly and ensure validation, spam protection, and compliance.
• Third-Party Forms: HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, etc., can be integrated via APIs for advanced workflows, analytics, and CRM connectivity.
• Create New Forms: Rebuild forms with modern UX, accessibility, and responsive design.
• Migrate Old Submission Data: Extract and import previous form submissions into the new system or CRM, keeping field mapping and timestamps intact.
• Best Practices: Track submissions in analytics, test end-to-end, and make forms configurable for content authors.

This approach ensures new forms work seamlessly while historical data is preserved.

8. Personalization & Experimentation

Migrating personalization and experimentation requires careful planning to preserve engagement and insights.

• Export & Rebuild: Export existing rules, personas, and goals. Review them thoroughly and recreate only what aligns with current business requirements.
• A/B Testing: Identify active experiments, migrate if relevant, and rerun them in the new environment to validate performance.
• Sitecore Personalize Implementation:
  • Plan data flow into the CDP and configure event tracking.
  • Implement personalization via Sitecore Personalize Cloud or Engage SDK for xm cloud implementation, depending on requirements.

Best Practices:

• Ensure content authors can manage personalization rules and experiments without developer intervention.
• Test personalized experiences end-to-end and monitor KPIs post-migration.

A structured approach to personalization ensures targeted experiences, actionable insights, and a smooth transition to the new Sitecore environment.

9. Accessibility

Ensuring accessibility is essential for compliance, usability, and SEO.

• Follow WCAG standards: proper color contrast, semantic HTML, ARIA roles, and keyboard navigation.
• Validate content with accessibility tools and manual checks before migration cutover.
• Accessible components improve user experience for all audiences and reduce legal risk.

10. Performance, Caching & Lazy Loading

Optimizing performance is critical during a migration to ensure fast page loads, better user experience, and improved SEO.

• Caching Strategies:
  • Use Sitecore output caching and data caching for frequently accessed components.
  • Implement CDN caching for media assets to reduce server load and improve global performance.
  • Apply cache invalidation rules carefully to avoid stale content.
• Lazy Loading:
  • Load images, videos, and heavy components only when they enter the viewport.
  • Improves perceived page speed and reduces initial payload.
• Performance Best Practices:
  • Optimize images and media (WebP/AVIF).
  • Minimize JavaScript and CSS bundle size, and use tree-shaking where possible.
  • Monitor Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID) post-migration.
  • Test performance across devices and regions before go-live.
  • Content Author Consideration:
  • Ensure caching and lazy loading do not break dynamic components or personalization.
  • Provide guidance to authors on content that might impact performance (e.g., large images or embeds).

Proper caching and lazy loading ensure a fast, responsive, and scalable Sitecore experience, preserving SEO and user satisfaction after migration.

11. CI/CD, Monitoring & Automated Testing

A well-defined deployment and monitoring strategy ensures reliability, faster releases, and smooth migrations.

• CI/CD Pipelines:
  • Set up automated builds and deployments according to your hosting platform: Azure, Vercel, Netlify, or on-premise.
  • Ensure deployments promote items consistently across Dev → QA → UAT → Prod.
  • Include code linting, static analysis, and unit/integration tests in the pipeline.
• Monitoring & Alerts:
  • Track website uptime, server health, and performance metrics.
  • Configure timely alerts for downtime or abnormal behavior to prevent business impact.
• Automated Testing:
  • Implement end-to-end, regression, and smoke tests for different environments.
  • Include automated validation for content, forms, personalization, and integrations.
  • Integrate testing into CI/CD pipelines to catch issues early.
• Best Practices:
  • Ensure environment consistency to prevent drift.
  • Use logs and dashboards for real-time monitoring.
  • Align testing and deployment strategy with business-critical flows.

A robust CI/CD, monitoring, and automated testing strategy ensures reliable deployments, reduced downtime, and faster feedback cycles across all environments.

12. Governance, Licensing & Cutover

A successful migration is not just technical — it requires planning, training, and governance to ensure smooth adoption and compliance.

• License Validation: Compare the current Sitecore license with what the new setup requires. Ensure coverage for all modules, environments. Validate and provide accurate rights to users and roles.
• Content Author & Marketer Readiness:
  • Train teams on the new workflows, tools, and interface.
  • Provide documentation, demos, and sandbox environments to accelerate adoption.
• Backup & Disaster Recovery:
  • Plan regular backups and ensure recovery procedures are tested.
  • Define RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) for critical data.
• Workflow, Roles & Permissions:
  • Recreate workflows, roles, and permissions in the new environment.
  • Implement custom workflows if required.
  • Governance gaps can lead to compliance and security risks — audit thoroughly.
• Cutover & Post-Go-Live Support:
  • Plan the migration cutover carefully to minimize downtime.
  • Prepare a support plan for immediate issue resolution after go-live.
  • Monitor KPIs, SEO, forms, personalization, and integrations to ensure smooth operation.

Proper governance, training, and cutover planning ensures the new Sitecore environment is compliant, adopted by users, and fully operational from day one.

13. Training & Documentation

Proper training ensures smooth adoption and reduces post-migration support issues.

• Content Authors & Marketers: Train on new workflows, forms, personalization, and content editing.
• Developers & IT Teams: Provide guidance on deployment processes, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Documentation: Maintain runbooks, SOPs, and troubleshooting guides for ongoing operations.
• Encourage hands-on sessions and sandbox practice to accelerate adoption.

Summary:

Sitecore migrations are complex, and success often depends on the small decisions made throughout development, performance tuning, SEO handling, and governance. This blog brings together practical approaches and lessons learned from real-world implementations — aiming to help teams build scalable, accessible, and future-ready Sitecore solutions.

While every project is different, the hope is that these shared practices offer a useful starting point for others navigating similar journeys. The Sitecore ecosystem continues to evolve, and so do the ways we build within it.