The Sitecore community back together in person and here's my take on Day 1.
The Night Before: Speaker Dinner
The tradition continues. The evening before SUGCON, speakers and organisers gathered for a dinner, and this year we added darts to the mix. Good talks and enough fun to set the tone for the day ahead. This is exactly the kind of moment that reminds you why these in-person events still matter.
Keynote: Where Sitecore Is Taking the Platform
Scott Liewehr opened the day with a clear look at where the platform is heading. The framing was deliberate: Sitecore is positioning SitecoreAI not as a feature layer but as the foundation of what comes next. Jacqueline Baxter and Ruadhán Barry followed with a grounded product and digital experience discussion that filled in the detail behind the strategic vision, useful for anyone trying to map the roadmap to delivery reality.
Richard Potter from Microsoft then took the stage to outline how Microsoft and Sitecore are building the digital experience frontier together. It was one of the stronger keynote moments of the day practitioner-oriented, not a co-marketing exercise, and the agentic commerce thread he pulled on is worth paying attention to over the next 12 months.
A Moment That Mattered: Recognising Tamas Varga
If there was one moment from Day 1 that the room will remember, it was this.
Tamas Varga, Director of Community at Sitecore, was recognised for everything he's contributed to this community over the years. When he leaves in July, he becomes an honorary MVP. It's richly deserved, and the reaction in the room said everything.
The sessions I've joined
Session: Beyond the Chatbot - Five AI Engineering Patterns from Building a Sitecore Code Analysis Engine
Nick Allen from from Think Fresh Digital built a production-grade code analysis and migration tool to support JSS-to-Content SDK migrations, and used that real delivery experience to extract five engineering patterns for making AI systems dependable at scale.
What made it stand out was the engineering rigour. RAG with smart chunking to ground analysis in actual Sitecore documentation, and a sharp distinction between using AI evaluation tooling to understand what good looks like versus CI/CD to protect the codebase.
Session: Exploring SitecoreAI Publishing - How to Make Your Authors Love Publishing Again
The authoring experience in Sitecore has always been a point of friction, particularly as the platform moved headless and some of the editorial comfort of the classic CMS got left behind. This session looked at what SitecoreAI publishing changes for content authors in practice: smarter workflows, reduced manual overhead, and an experience that doesn't make editors want to quit.
The practical angle resonated. Too many AI capability discussions stay at the architecture level. Talking about what changes for the person actually sitting in the CMS every day is the conversation that drives adoption.
Session: Connecting Every Marketing Action to Business Outcomes
This one hit on a problem every enterprise marketing team knows: daily activities, campaigns, content, social posts, exist in a completely different conversation from the outcomes executives actually care about. Revenue. Acquisition. Retention. The two worlds rarely meet.
Ece Erkol Opitz and Derek Fahey presented Sitecore AI's Goals Framework as the answer to that gap. The idea is structurally sound: make strategic objectives the foundation of how work is organised, not something you try to map onto it after the fact. Define measurable goals, connect every campaign and content piece directly to those outcomes, get real-time visibility into progress.
Marketplace Update and Community Hackathon
Romina Metnik and Christian Hahn closed out the day with a look at what's new and what's next in the Sitecore Marketplace. The numbers from the keynote set the context, 710 active custom apps, 60+ public apps, and the session gave a clear read on where the extensibility story is heading. The community hackathon presentation wrapped things up on a high note.
Stay tuned for my 2nd day highlights post.
