As Sitecore continues to evolve with AI-driven capabilities, I’ve been thinking a lot about how organizations are actually approaching it.
What I’m seeing across teams is that most are treating SitecoreAI like a feature set, something to “turn on,” experiment with, and layer into what already exists. But that’s not really what this is.
SitecoreAI isn’t just adding functionality, it’s changing how work gets done. And if the way your team operates doesn’t evolve with it, you’re going to feel that pretty quickly.
It’s not about features, it’s about workflows
One of the biggest shifts with SitecoreAI is that it starts to bring more of the work directly to the marketer. With agents, flows, and prebuilt integrations, marketers can now generate structured content, trigger workflows across systems, and act on insights in near real time.
Before, this usually meant pulling in multiple teams, dev, architecture, sometimes even external partners. Now, that barrier is lower.
But that doesn’t mean structure goes away. It just moves.
This is where the operating model comes in
If you’re bringing SitecoreAI into your ecosystem, you’re not just adding new tools. You’re changing how things get done.
Things move faster. Ownership spreads out. Systems are more connected. And if you’re not aligned, it gets messy pretty quickly.
This is where a lot of teams struggle.
They focus on enablement, but not on how the team actually needs to work differently.
What actually needs to change
From what I’ve seen, and what’s becoming more clear as these capabilities evolve, there are four areas that really need to be thought through:
1. People: Who owns what?
Not just at a high level, but clearly defining who owns agents and flows, who is responsible for reviewing AI-generated content, and who steps in when something breaks across systems.
As more of this work moves closer to the marketer, clear ownership matters even more. Without it, work falls through the cracks and issues go unresolved.
2. Process: How does work actually move?
AI speeds things up, but if your processes still rely on handoffs, approvals, and waiting on other teams, things don’t actually move any faster and teams end up blocked more than they should.
This really comes down to how campaigns are created and iterated, when human review is actually needed, and how quickly teams can act on insights.
3. Technology: How does everything connect?
SitecoreAI is built for integration. It relies on connected systems, clean data flow, and consistent structure across content and assets.
If those pieces aren’t aligned, the AI layer won’t perform the way you expect it to.
4. Governance: How do you keep things aligned?
This is the one that tends to get overlooked the most, something I’ve seen in past projects and have talked about in my backlog governance blog.
As you give more power to marketers, you still need guardrails, clear permissions, and standards for content and outputs.
Without that, consistency starts to slip, and in some cases, the wrong things make it out.
Where teams tend to get stuck
A few patterns I’m already seeing across SitecoreAI implementations, and in my own client work, are teams treating AI like a plugin instead of shifting how they operate, not defining clear ownership of agents or workflows, assuming governance will figure itself out, and not aligning business, marketing, and technology early enough.
The good news is, these aren’t technical problems. They’re operating model problems, and they’re fixable.
My perspective
As a PM, this is the kind of shift I find really exciting, because it’s where our role as PMs moves beyond delivery and into strategy.
It’s also why I’ve been spending more time digging into SitecoreAI and Studio, going deeper into the latest capabilities and how they actually work.
Understanding the platform matters, and knowing how the tools fit together does too. But what really drives success is being able to step back and ask, “How should this team actually work differently because of this?”
The more you understand how it actually works, the better you can guide teams on how to use it effectively.
Final thought
SitecoreAI has a lot of potential.
But the teams that get the most out of it won’t be the ones that adopt the fastest. It comes from taking the time to rethink how they operate.
