Welcome, everyone. I'm Kim Davis, editor at large at MarTech. Thanks for joining us for today's webinar. Flex your content management for scalability and hyper personalization presented by Crown Peak and MarTech. Before we get started, here are a few tips. If you have any viewing issues, you can use the Q&A section to communicate with us, and you can also send questions and comments directly to our speakers about this presentation at any time. And talking of speakers, let me introduce our guests today. We have Imran Choudhary, VP of Product Marketing at Crownpeak, Paul Taylor, VP of Solutions Engineering at Crownpeak, and Sabine van Almsick, Business Development and Strategy at Intentive. And Imran, I'll turn it over to you. Great. Thank you very much, Kim. Thank you everyone, for joining today. Um, maybe if we just add a little bit more to the intros, you know, who's sponsoring and, uh, facilitating this session today. So as Kim said, Imran Choudhary and VP of Product Marketing here at Crownpeak. Crown peak are a digital experience provider. So we are empowering marketeers and e-commerce teams to drive personalized experiences, be that through content or product, or also making sure that it's accessible to everyone through digital quality and assurance. And I'm joined by Paul Taylor, our solutions engineer from the business and one of our strategic partners from the DACH region, which is Sabine from intentive. So thank you very much for joining us today. Now we've got a series of topics that we're going to be running through today. But before we start, I just want to reflect. So as some of you aware, I was at Shop Talk a few weeks back and it's probably one of the largest retail events outside of maybe NRF. And I just want to set a little bit of a scene because it felt to me walking through and speaking to many of the attendees there, but we're a bit of a wash. We're awash of all these different approaches within content management. You've got full stack, you've got hybrid, you've got headless. It's it's all a wash of different terms. But fundamentally this session today is around flexing that content management. And I want to just pick up on that term flex. What I see and what I heard at Shoptalk is you've got marketeers who want in flexibility and agility in terms of content creation, publication, the visibility and management of this across all channels. But that term flexibility and agility kind of changes. It changes when you speak to the technical teams, you know, they're talking flexibility in terms of integration and a desire for open APIs. So, Paul Sabine, what I'd like to do is just try and get your views to set the scene. Given the topic of content management and flex, which is the purpose of today, be good to get your theme and your point of view. What we actually mean by flexibility in the world of content management. Paul. Yeah, I mean, Imran, you know, you're right. There's been a lot of change in how the world views content management. Vendors have been scrambling to redefine their offering to the market, fueled by a wave of architectural change. There are now multiple types of content management platforms that you can choose from when selecting what's right for your business. But with today's squeeze in budgets, coupled with the customer's soaring expectations, very few organizations have the luxury of multiple content management platforms. And so this is where the term flex comes in. It's about making the most of what you already have to delight your customers and to keep your marketers agile. Frankie. Frankie. I think that's, um. That's a fair point. We all don't have the budget, the time or the resources for any big digital transformations. Right now, they're very few and far between. Um, so, Sabine, from Intentive's perspective, from an agency perspective, what's your view? Yeah. Thank you. Imran. Intensive is a digital agency. What we often see is that our clients want to have a better time to market with new requirements. AI driven applications are a key factor. Our clients want to use the potential of personalized approach to optimize the customer journey or experience and edit us. They want something to and that just want to use generative services for creating content. The availability of a broad, structured and consistent database is an important precondition for AI supported services. Without the availability of data, AI algorithms won't work. The better the input data for AI algorithms, the better will be the real result. I think that's clear. That's an easy rule. Data is a new oil. This quote comes from Clive Humble, a British mathematician. The quote is more relevant than ever before. The availability of existing data of a company is a key success factor. Modern dxp make data from a wide variety of broken systems available for the web, and with regard to speed and a good time to market, we need the software architecture, which supports to be fast. Modern web architecture is not monolithic. No, it isn't, and it is not proprietary. It follows standards. That's very important. Modern architecture is open. This means flexibility. That was your questions for me. We will discuss this in this webinar and I'm -really looking forward to it. -Yes, Sabine. And well done. You got AI within the first two minutes. You know a very good. Yes. Very good. Obviously it's a hot topic for today. So let's start with, um, let's start with the first topic. So the pulse of real time marketing. And we're talking here about the immediacy of content delivery. And I think it's been this content generative piece that you kind of allude to that kind of falls into some of this as well. Very much so the case right now today, and we talk a little bit about CMS being the game changer, a lovely marketing term that we seem to use here and there. But maybe before we kind of jump to that CMS piece, let's just kind of be good to reflect if that's okay. Um, Paul, in terms of the demands from marketeers and what, what the demands are on them from the industry, what's that looking like right now, today? What are -you seeing from the field? -I think, you know, we're seeing two things fundamentally. First of all, customer expectation. It's an all time high. And it's being set by brands like Amazon, Apple and Google. If you, as a marketer, can't provide a customer with a conversation that they want about the product that they want via the channel that they want, when they want it, you're going to lose them. And so the marketeers job has become much more complicated, and this is increasing daily. I think secondly, there's a threat as well as an opportunity with artificial intelligence that the marketing world is changing and will change forever. With the recent release of generative AI to the mainstream, marketers and customers expect to engage with a brand conversationally and more than ever, marketers now must adapt using AI technologies and strategies to keep that customer interested. I think there's an added complexity there, Paul as well. What what I'm seeing anyway, I speak to customers. There's a lot of brands are international now or moving to be international. So it's not just the demands in local or home country. It's also adapting that to all the different regional preferences as well as regulation and localization. So yeah, um, it's a hard time and it's getting even harder. Um, maybe I is the answer. Sabine. Your take. Yes. My first sentence starts with a I. Again, AI technology enables marketers to create more personalized content. That means with AI, they can faster create content on the one hand, and on the other hand, they get support by specialized tools to get a better understanding of their customer segment. For example, I can support the marketeer with segmentations on the base of CRM data. That can be a helpful insight because maybe an AI finds a new segment you were not aware of. Let's have a look at the needs of an editor. We have a look at the next slide. You see, it's a practical one. One job to be done by marketeers might be the creation of a campaign site. For my example, it's not important if it is microsite or it's if it is a landing page. So you will see we we make it on a campaign site first. Editors will be glad to have support by an AI which helps creating content. Actually it is possible to create text, for example with ChatGPT or something like that. Perhaps you already work with a tool like that, a text creation tool, and maybe they you have a CMS which is which has an AI based integration. So it would be very fine. But the next thing that would be better than fine is if you have a trained AI database with your company's data. The result is a text in your company's jargon, with your corporate identity, with your branding and your naming. That's wonderful. And translation in that way, without switching to another tool, for example, DBL or something like that are extremely helpful for the editors. A modern Dxp or CMS supports editors in that way. Crownpeaks CMS has a translation studio which supports translation without switching to another tool. This is both helpful and modern. I think the other point, just Sabine, is when we're generating, um, some of this content, um, if is the control of it. So, you know, I'm glad to hear when you talk about the training, but equally, when we're generating this, especially if we're generating a lot of content at speed, it's that quality. Um, so that's something that we also, um, look to improve upon within our controls, as it were, or within our platform, because, you know, you want to make sure that whatever you're publishing is not only accessible, but it's abiding by whatever brand guidelines you have or regulatory compliance. It's it's another key area that I think is often overlooked with generative. We generate it and we publish it, but actually we want to make sure that it's right, it's accessible and it's also compliant to be to brand or to regulation. So okay so we talked a little bit about challenges. That's just getting more challenging. The world never changes. It's always challenging. We talked about AI potentially can help us there. But what about the CMS component. So let's use that wonderful marketing term. You know how can CMS be that game changer Rand Paul. Um, I think, uh, composability can be the answer. You know, where the pace of customer demand is increasing at its current rate. Adapting your digital strategies to suit is challenging. And in some cases, it's nearly impossible. And that's due to, you know, multiple competing business and technology strategies. Adopting a composable technology strategy can prove beneficial. It doesn't require you to adopt a single platform for your entire marketing technology stack, but instead it empowers you to select a blend of technologies that will best serve your business and your customers. Okay. Sabine, do you agree? Yes, I agree. But that's not the end of my answer. The the blend of technology is a key factor for flexibility. It is necessary to use technologies and an architecture that supports specialized and composable settings. Other. Otherwise, there's a risk of having a system which is hard to adapt, for example, to new features. I support a new future requirements. Everyone who has bought, for example, an Ikea furniture knows that this furniture is perfectly designed, um, for each other. But in most cases it is hard to combine them with other products of other vendors. And that's quite the same with a monolithic CMS that is not open for other systems and interfaces is to use the benefits of different marketing tools. It is necessary to have an open, not monolithic, composable technology stack. Okay. I kind of wished, in a way. Sabine, you said no. We could have had a little bit of an argument and a tussle between you guys. Okay. All right, so cross-platform. So, you know, cross-platform consistency in this wonderful, you know, unified brand voice. Again, another hot topic that you see at every event, every show, every year. We strive for it. I think for me, we always instinctively think about the web. But from my engagements with the market, there's much more than just the web as the channel. So some of the clients that we work with also have stores in in-store kiosks. They have field sales, they have internal portals, customer success portals, all these different technologies. They're trying to kind of manage and create this consistency. So I'm curious, Paul, how are folks enabling this unified voice when they've got all these channels? And to a little bit of the point that Sabine's mentioned all these different technologies behind the scene. Yeah, it's it's a challenge for sure. And ultimately it's it's down to talking to your customer. We've already touched on, you know, how important it is now to talk to your customers when and when or where they are. You've got to drive that same personalized, conversational message to their mobile device, to the in-store kiosk. It's the same message you're driving to the website. Regardless of the channel, that message must be consistent. Otherwise, we risk losing customer loyalty. And so one of the biggest challenges with consistency in the message across every digital touchpoint is technology incompatibility. The number of channels is increasing at such a pace. I think there are give or take, 350 digital touchpoints across the enterprise as of last year, and that's creating various technologies across that stack. So much content creation and delivery platforms simply cannot deliver content to every single part of the customer lifecycle across every touchpoint. And so many organizations are stuck communicating inconsistent messages, which ultimately affect customer -sentiment. -Okay, Sabina, I'm guessing that you kind of agree with Paul. I'm guessing there's no confrontation there, but it'd be good to understand from an agency's perspective. You know, what does the solution on an approach like this look like? What does that look like from your experience? Yes, we we stay on our example with the campaign side. Uh, this slide, we concentrate on the clicky button. You see the CTA at the bottom of the, uh, campaign site on my slide, you see a typical web form. One moment. Yes. Here it is. A typical web form. After a prospective client clicks on the button, click here. This form might be also used on other channel sites, for example shops, apps, websites, campaign sites, etc. if you have planned to create a new campaign site, you have two options to do so. I show you, click. Yes. Option number one is you develop the campaign side and the processes, the logic, etc. are placed in the campaign site. You see it here. I don't know if you see my cursor, but they are. The form is connected with the CRM, the newsletter management, etc. it is stored in the campaign site. And the other way to do it is the following. One moment. Ah! Now you see option number two. Is you develop a campaign site and the processes, the logic etc. are placed outside the campaign side in the middleware. Or we can call it availability layer. If there is a change because of an additional system which needs to be informed, you just need to change the middleware. In the other case, in option number one, you have to change every campaign sign cites you. You have built on option number one. This is a base. If you if you use a middleware, it is a base of a consistent message delivery. This works very wonderful in combination with headless systems and composable system supports this architecture as well. So use a middleware to extract logic and layout and processes and make -this in the middleware. -So I want to pick on this maybe review poll a little bit, especially given from an engineering and solution in perspective, because we see a lot of clients that are in this place of using all these different technologies. And Sabine's shown a very good picture here in terms of all the different, um, tools that are needed to bring all these things together, let's say, in a simple campaign. But what happens when I don't want to build things from new? I'm kind of trying to use what I've got to a certain extent, but get more out of it. And I have got some legacy tools and some touch points. So what are we what are we doing here? You know, how are we helping people avoid big switches and big -costs? -It's a very interesting point. You know, a lot of people think that it's all about the new. But there's a lot of stuff legacy that's in the business. To your point, one of the major analyst firms ran a piece a few years ago where they discussed the rate of organizations ditching their digital transformation programs, and it was down to legacy platform challenges. The cost about it. When you think about it, digital transformation is precisely that. It's transforming your customer and employee experience across every digital touchpoint, not just a handful of those. And if we think about many global organizations and their digital touchpoints, you know, 350 or so we said earlier, quite quickly updating the experience of this can become overwhelming not only from a flexibility perspective, but also from cost. So, you know, as Sabine discussed, one answer to transforming legacy touchpoints might be to deliver content using a headless CMS. After all, it's technology agnostic. However, how much of the legacy application you'll have to rebuild to make this dream a reality? Do you have the skills? Do you have the expertise to do that? Can you afford the cost of replatforming or significantly altering your legacy touch points? Many organizations cannot, and so this is where the program dies. But there is another way. You know, headless is an excellent answer for some technical challenges. But there's also another the ability to deliver content and technology in precisely the same way that every single legacy touchpoint has always worked. So let me give you an example. If you have a legacy WebSphere Customer portal, well deliver that content to that platform using JSP page fragments. If you have an MVC. Net application, deliver content using razor syntax, CSS, HTML files, if you have stadium or in-store signage, deliver that payload as XML or Json, or if you're trying to get consistency across every communication, drive your email templates directly from your CMS to your marketing automation platform. By thinking less about the CMS platforms technology limitations and more about your legacy touch points capabilities, you can balance technology and cost efficiency while potentially improving performance, security, and content satisfaction. And I think one more thought, you know, it doesn't have to stop there. Once you've extended the life of your existing legacy touch points, you can then innovate on top of them by using the myriad of composable solutions. You know, for example, personalization, AI search and recommendations to drive further content -engagement and performance. -Um, I know you're talking very much from Crown Peak's perspective, and I know in terms of from a CMS perspective on our side, we're quite unique in that we can manage and integrate with a lot of these touch points, as you call it, and all these different languages, which does help with that transition and not needing to do any major refactoring of code or development or whatever. But if I can, if I kind of maybe come out a little bit from the Crown Peak perspective. And as Sabine, Sabine, I know you work with Crown Peak heavily, but I also know you work with many other different tools as well as an independent agency. So I'm curious if we take the. Hat off for a little bit, you know. How are you working with such legacy systems and architecture? What does that look like for you? Yes, if we work with legacy systems, our architecture helps us again. Of course, as a what? We wouldn't have chosen it. Let me explain it at this slide. The major idea in our architecture that you have a legacy system with its own data structure. You see it here. This cylinder is a data structure of the legacy system. And what we do is we import the data structure of the legacy system in our availability middleware. You see it here. We have a data importer for that. But that's not what we do. Uh, that's not all what we do. What we do is we import and normalize the data. That means that we, uh, we we, um, adapt data formats, currencies, key structures, attributes and so on, and we adapt it to an international standard. This is a really crucial step because after the data is imported, you can use it with every system connected to the middleware. That's great. This is an efficient way and it is a fast way. And that's not all the good news is. Furthermore, if you replace a legacy system with another system in the future, you just have to change the data importer. Ah, that's a good idea. I think no other application or front end is affected by the replacement. That's a big advantage compared to a 1 to 1 integration, which was option number one in my before example. And for you, there's a short time to market when replacing a legacy system. I think what's clear and we kind of move on to it. I guess now when we get into that scalability and flexibility pieces, you know, nothing, nothing stays static. Nothing remains the same. I think we all have various skeletons buried with regards to legacy, but we're all trying to manage. But equally there is new technology coming on the market, new requirements, new demands. And I know this is something, Paul, you've been tracking what? We've, uh, what we've the usual martech landscape, but, you know, how are folks trying to keep ahead or trying to keep afloat with regards to scaling against all this fluctuating market with not only demands but all these technology choices? Yeah. You know, you talk about that. The choice that market is now have and it's almost unparalleled. Chief martech something that I follow a lot. They released that marketing technology landscape back in 2011, and there were 150 vendors on it at the time. Now, as of last update in 2024, that number is over 11,000. And so today's marketer has an unparalleled choice of vendors to help them build their digital experience, platform, vision. And that in turn creates complexity that at times, as we've said, can be overwhelming. As we've already discussed, today's customers don't stand still either. Their expectations are growing frighteningly so, and similar to the words of, you know, Wayne Gretzky. Marketers, like hockey players, need to meet the customer not where they are, but where they are going or where the puck is going. But with all those available technology choices and changing customer market demand, how can organizations ensure that their technology choice remains scalable and flexible? And for me, it comes down to the fact that not all vendors are equal. Earlier, we discussed the ability to deliver any content using any language or framework to any location in the world, and that supports every single customer touchpoint. That is a critical capability that every organization needs to keep pace with their customers demand. But organizations also need to ensure that their marketers have the latest features and capabilities at their fingertips to take advantage of that architectural flexibility that they've now been given. And so the best way to do that is to select platforms that exclusively deliver on a software as a service SaaS model. And in that way, an organization is always on the latest version of the software. That software is frequently updated to ensure that capabilities and security best practices are automatically deployed to protect an organization and to keep their teams agile. Beware, however, that not all vendors are equal in that regard, and with so many content management vendors operating on platforms created before the SAS wave, some have chosen not to change their business practices to meet that customer need. And so really, it comes down to choosing wisely. Not all vendors are equal. Hey. Yeah, it's a bold statement. Um, Sabine, what's your take? You see many vendors, and I'm guessing there are many agencies like yours. So what's your take on the topic? That's a good point. Not all vendors are equal. I like the sentence. Yes. Um, it is quite the same with implementation partners. I would say not all digital agencies are equal. If we take our project from a digital agency, we often see that processes logic, data are mixed up in one system. It's um, I would say it's a whole mess. In those cases, we often analyze the existing platform together with our client. After that, we create an individual architecture concept. And of course, this concept separates layout data and processes. So this is very important I just can repeat it all the time separated. Otherwise you have a very big risk to to to be not future proven if you do that. So separate layout data and processes. You can react on market changes quickly. You can add new processes in the middleware and use it in all your channels. That that is easy. Please remember my architecture diagram on the slides before. This works perfectly good with API driven there's platforms. Thank you very. Thank you. So let's touch on the the other side of this webinar. So the personalization topic. So we talked about scaling and flexing. Let's talk a little bit more about personalization. And I think we spoke a little bit about the challenges marketers and teams are facing with the demands that they've got. But Paul how are we you know, in terms of personalization and how Cms's CMS tools are enabling this? You know, what's kind of -working? What are you seeing? -There's there's definitely an increased sophistication across our customers. And it's as their sophistication is increased, so have the hundreds of personalization platforms that help our marketers drive this 1 to 1 impactful, consistent messaging. I think, you know, gone are the days when you had to use the personalization platform that comes embedded within your CMS or your Dxp. With this increase in marketing technology vendors, there's now a much wider choice of platforms than ever before. And that's important as every part of the digital experience platform should be regularly evaluated against business and customer need, and if necessarily, replaced. We've already discussed that these average 350 touchpoints that you have with your customer. And if you think about it, it's unrealistic for you to replace every platform that delivers content to your customers simply to drive a personalized message. And so fortunately for us, there are personalization platforms that decouple themselves from the content creation and delivery platform platforms that can personalize content at scale and deliver it either through client side overlay, for example using JavaScript or via API to support headless channels. And these personalization platforms help organizations drive a hyper personalized experience across every single channel, not just those that you typically associate with a CMS or Dxp. Let me give you an example. Um, dynamic yield, which is a personalized platform that we use in our business. They were bought previously historically by McDonald's, and the reason that McDonald's bought them was that they wanted to personalize the experience for every single McDonald's drive thru customer across North America. And so you arrive at the drive through, your license plate is read by the camera at the end of the bay, and your license data is processed by the Dynamic Yield platform, which then informs the person that is serving you your meal on the most likely food combination that you're going to go with. And I think that's a really good example of where it's not just about web and mobile and social, but it's also about every single interaction that you have with the brand and why that's so important across every touchpoint. And so as customers engage with organizations across an ever increasing selection of channels, the customer record becomes much more critical. We've seen recently the rise of the customer data platform, the CDP, over the past few years, which has been an evolution of the original CRM customer relationship management platforms. What CDPs are doing are offering organizations this centralized location to store all of their customer data, all of their interactions with the customer across every single channel, store and process, audience segmentation, and ultimately to drive that engaging content via these personalization platforms across every customer touchpoint, you can elevate your conversation, your engagement, and your revenues by connecting your content with your customers through all of those personalization touchpoints and -analytics platforms. -Okay, so Sabine, how am I aligning my technology so that that message is consistent? You know, how do I ensure that that message is consistent across all these different touchpoints that Paul's talking to, when maybe I've got some technology mismatch at the moment? How do I deal with that? What are those challenges that you're seeing and how are you dealing with them. And I'm hoping you've got some slide where to show us, because that sounds like one. We might need to get a little bit deeper. Yes, I have some slides. And let's go back to our example, because I think it's clear what we do here. We have a campaign sign. And you see there are now some green frames. And yes, we are looking now at the middle of the of the campaign side. But first of all, I can tell you as a technology implementation partner, we are best prepared, uh, with our software architecture. Let's have a look in our example headline text elements and the from from process is fine. The the editor is well supported and happy with it. So everything is good. But in the middle one moment let's click. Aha. It's red again. We have. Personalize a personalized content out of a product database. Yes, you see it here. Um, there are two systems involved. We have a PIM which has the product data, and on the right side we have dynamic yield, which is the personalization engine. In this case, it is dynamic yield or Crownpeak product discovery. What we do is we orchestrate the communication between the PIM and dynamic yield. And a good place to do this is our middleware in our middle layer, where we have all the processes and business logic, um, stored and the middleware communicates with the output channels. In our example it is the campaign side. Yes, but it must be the campaign site. It can be the corporate website, the apps, the shops. You see it at the top. It's just an example. This is transparent and it is consistent with an increasing number of front end and back end systems, front end channels and back end systems. Otherwise, as Paul said, it is a challenge to integrate the processes into your channels and this will increase costs, errors and the time to market. So, Sabine, if we can go a bit deeper then so from a personalization platform, if I'm decoupling that from content creation and also the delivery platform, how am I how am I still delivering hyper personalized experiences across all of these channels? Can you go a little bit deeper in that given that we're looking at decoupling -now? -Yes, of course. Uh, decoupling is a solution for the enablement of hyper personalization for organization. So we can integrate hyper personalization tools either in our middleware or the CMS is part of an app which has a content personalization engine like Crown Peaks CMS. Those variants work fine and are comfortable for technology implementation partners like we are. The Crown CMS has an integrated content personalization, which is called dynamic yield. And it works very, very fine with us. And it is perfect to integrate. If a customer has another preferred or existing solution, no problem, we can add it instead. This is what composability means. This is modern and as we started it is flexible. And you just want to maybe pick up on some of that as well. So yes, you're quite right. Um, Crown peak have integrated very successfully with dynamic yield within our content editor and our studios. Um, but we always believe in composability and being open. So, you know, even though great partner, we OEM very successfully dynamic yield and a lot of our for our customers. There are other personalization platforms out there and we welcome them and we try and make it as easy as possible. As you say, being composable, trying to be that flexible and modern architecture that we are. So let's maybe let's change it up a little bit, because I feel like we've not talked about AI for at least five minutes, so maybe we can bring that back into the conversation a little bit. So, um, I think if I just flick to our next one. So we're we're on track. So, you know, I ongoing conversation very is moving very fast. So I'm curious, you know how we talked a little bit about it earlier, but can we dig a little bit deeper in terms of how we're seeing AI practically in real terms? If I can pick on you, Paul, but in real terms, practically, how is AI transforming content strategy right now? Yeah, it's it's something that, you know, we see a lot across our customer base. And we're fortunate enough to have, you know, our own internal AI capabilities as part of our business. But from our customer base, it really comes down to, you know, this increased inflation and it's it's forcing companies to reduce their costs. There's this constant push to do more with less. And in challenging economic environments. You then couple that with increased complexity ability of these customer user journeys, the overload of data coming from multi-channel and multi journey touchpoints. And so the result of those two demands, it creates opportunities for organizations to excel within the rise of artificial intelligence, specifically to drive efficiencies in the content production process, which is about designing digital experiences that truly matter. And so from a marketing perspective, today they spend 100% of their time creating these engaging, personalized content experiences, which is typically a very, very manual and time consuming process. The goal of tomorrow is to be able to automate 80% of the effort to drive productivity, uh, in a scalable way and to maximize ROI. And by doing that, marketers will then get to spend 100% of their efforts delivering what they can only spend 20% of their time doing today, which is driving creativity. And in doing that, creating unique and consistent experiences across that entire customer journey and ones that feel natural. Now, from a potential perspective, we see a lot, right? There's there's a vast potential for organizations that harness the power of AI and specifically Gen II, AI powered Dxp capabilities. So every stage of the customer lifecycle, firstly, in content creation Copilot, they can help marketers to create text image. And video content that targets specific customer demographics that, you know, duplicate content can be automatically translated and localized to target customers. In commerce, we see end to end virtual recommendations that can help customers locate products quicker and thereby increasing their average order values, while at the same time creating a conversational aftersales experience that drives brand loyalty. User intent can be identified within search that creates more intuitive content recommendations. Search can now be powered by conversational AI, which makes every interaction feel more natural and more human marketers. They can create message variations for each customer touchpoint. They can optimize SEO, but one of the big benefits of doing that will be empowering the experimentation culture. Because testing is now relatively cheap. And of course, analytics. AI empowers organizations to quickly make sense of high volumes of data at a pace that we could never before realized. Trends can be identified and acted upon, while anomalies and outlying trends are quickly discounted. And so, you know what? What are we doing about it at Crown Peak? Well, we're fortunate to have our own AI teams, as I mentioned earlier, and they work across all of our products. We get to see both the impact and the opportunities for AI delivery across every part of the product portfolio, and we can use that insight to help our customers drive efficiencies to theirs. We're helping customers reimagine content generation and optimization opportunities across the entire customer lifecycle from that text generation, image cropping, tagging, and translation to ultimately empower the marketer through content and product recommendations, which helps their customers optimize their buying journey. You know, something about all of that sounds actually quite practical. Who would believe in our conversation where we're talking about practical things that are actually quite real? Sabine, I'm right in thinking this is what you're seeing as an agency. You are working with customers in this way. You're starting to deliver these capabilities. You know, it's not just all -hype. You're seeing this now. Yeah. -No, it's not all hype. Yes. Um. Thanks, Paul. It was very good. Um, um, the base, the base of all AI tools is data. And that is very important to know if if the data is not good, you won't get a good result. And there are different ways to use AI to calibrate the content strategy. Paul mentioned a lot of tools like text creation, translation, trend analysis, etc. I if I would repeat it, I we we will sit tomorrow here. By incorporating these AI powered capabilities into your content workflow, you can streamline processes, you can improve personalization and make more informed, data driven decision. And you can transform your content strategy to stay ahead to the competition. Your data and external data from third party data providers are the keys to AI. That's very important. It is important and necessary to have a good data pool, and data pools do not have any layouts. I repeat myself, I know and they do not have any information about logic or process etc. so again and again separate data layout logic and the result is well prepared for AI usage. And then your future proven. Thank you. Sabine, it is quite clear we talk about how its changing content strategy, but I think it's also important to highlight how it's actually changing how we operate as teams. To your point, Paul, um, it is allowing folks to focus on the things that are actually quite important and ultimately things that kind of why we got into the job of marketing. You know what, we love that creative process. So I think that's all fair. We're kind of near enough time. So I want to just kind of close if I maybe start with you, Sabina, if that's all right. Paul talked a little bit too long on that last question. Yeah. So, um, I'm going to give it back to you, Sabine, and then maybe we'll give Paul the mic after. But, you know, as we close, you know, if someone's in this, this, this situation of looking at their technology, start looking at how they're operating, thinking about where's my journey, where I am at and where do I need to go. You know, when they call on you, what advice have you got? How would you work with someone like me? First of all, I welcome them. And my advice is, um, we start with a couple of workshops together with the customer to find out the requirements, the status quo and the individual way to achieve the goals. This is what we want to know. We look, of course, at the system architecture and at the existing data. We we often start with the short actual analysis. Yes. After that we discuss the pain points and of the company and the gains they want to reach. In these workshops, we get to know each other and get a deeper understanding of the individual needs of the company. Then and after that, really after that, we can suggest tools, we can suggest milestones, we define roles and responsibilities to have a successful and trustful journey experience with each other. As you can see, it's quite the same with your customers. The better you know them, the better you can advise them or give some recommendations. That's our way. Paul. And you can't say choose wisely. What's your what's your final -remarks, as it were? -Oh, I think, you know, one of the reasons we love working with intensive is their the pragmatism that they employ around solutions for their customers. It's about picking the right thing for the organization that's ultimately going to set them on the right path. I think from a platform vendor perspective, you know, don't think a one size fits all approach to experience delivery is the only way forward. What looks like a daunting implementation task at face value? You might find it's more straightforward than you thought with the right technology choice. And so go and look at platforms that empower you to enhance your experience, rather than rip and replace them all. And remember, you know, it's about moving closer to your customers across every channel, even if that's only one step -at a time. -Okay, I think we might have a few more minutes to do some Q&A because we have had a few shows come through, so, um. Let me just pull this up. Okay. So I've got 2 or 3 questions here. So as a marketer we rely a lot on developer support. Um with our CMS solutions. Um. Is developer support needed? Does this approach make it easier? What is the role of a developer going forward? Maybe. Paul, do you want to take that? Yeah. And great question. Thanks. Thanks very much. Um, I would say that, you know, traditionally the role of a developer is quite heavy inside, you know, a headless or, you know, an asynchronous or a composable stack. But I think you try to get the balance between developers and marketers in providing content, you know, distribution solutions and architectures. So I think you're still going to need developer assistance. That's not going away, and it shouldn't. But what we're able to do is start up compartmentalizing those roles into the right place. So instead of your developers have to make every content change for you, you can now have your developers build the content governance that you need as your organization, and then at the same time, give your marketers the flexibility to then use that content across any touchpoint, -wherever they want, at scale and pace. -Okay, so you know, I've got thank you. Sabina, I've got a bit of a question for you if it's okay. Um, so there's a question here around ROI and building a business case. Um, what are the typical approaches that you take as an agency to help marketers build the business case for signing off projects? First of all, I said that we have to, um, get to know the status quo and get to know the client. That's very important for us to get to know the customer. And after that, we work with, um, with the canvas, which is called value proposition canvas, where we get to know the paints again and the jobs to be done, what the customer needs are. And this is a kind of doing we, we, um, prefer and we advise to get to know the business case. Okay, I'll just add to that a little bit, if I may. Imran, I think, um, as you start to create a business case, quite often we're daunted by the perceived work that we've got to do across a channel that we may or may not think it's important. And I think when you realize that you can actually deliver content to that channel, as we said earlier, without necessarily having to rip and replace, suddenly the cost becomes less of a detractor or a barrier to being able to add value to the customer. So go and look across the touchpoints, go and understand what happens with the customer once they've transacted. Do they interact with the portal? You know, how do you get a customer you've already won to repeat, buy from you and go and figure out the value of that use case with a view of hey, maybe I haven't got to completely replace it from the ground up, and you might suddenly find that the -budget you need becomes available. -Okay, one more question. Um, so we've got a question here and it slightly gets to me, so I'm sorry. Um, but it's only off the back of Shoptalk because I saw vendors proclaiming various things. So the question is, and maybe Paul, you might be able to help me -here, but. -Oh, I think Imran is -frozen. -I think it runs frozen. I can see the question. Um, so thank you very much, Geoff. That put it in it said, what are the best, Jenny. Content creation slash personalization slash modularization tools. Um, in your opinion. So I mean, I'll give you a 10,000 foot view. You know, at Crown Peak, we are very fortunate to have our own data science team. Um, and we acquired that as part of our acquisition of attract around about 12 months ago or so. So that gives us some really good capabilities, um, to work with our customers. Having said that, you know, clearly you don't want to roll your own. And so, you know, we use a mixture of AI services. So we use open AI inside our platforms to help us drive those conversations. We also use services provided by Amazon Web Services, um, that help them build on not just AI content, but AI content that is in context of an organization's brand and quality as well. But the key thing for us is we remain agnostic. You know, if through all of our platforms and the whole world of composability is about saying, you know, you bring what is right for your organization for the reason that you choose it. And so if you have an AI provided that you work with and you have your own data lake and you want to use your own corporate content, then bring it into the mix and we will ensure that we build that into the solution, either through, you know, us or the rest. Um, and we'll work together to build something that works. Great question. I can confirm this. And for us as an implementation partner, as you will see, it's the easiest way to put it in the middleware. And the communication works with our middleware and the output channels. We can add um, artificial intelligence as an application. As you have seen, if it is a PIM, if it is a legacy system or whatever, in the back end, we can connect them and use the middleware to communicate for the communication between the systems in the back end. And um, then we communicate with front end system, with API and so on. So it's easy for us to combine every AI to with our channels, with the middleware and software architecture we use. -Okay. Um. -I'm back. So sorry about that, folks. The wonders of, um, of internet and live webinars. Well, it sounds as though, um, that question was answered. Just if I can just $0.02 because it does get to me a little bit, you know. So at shoptalk, everyone proclaiming that they had the best day, I. Um, my view is the way that this is developing, especially the open AI market. No one can really claim that they've got the the secret sauce or the silver bullet of any algorithm. I think for us as a business, our philosophy is, yes, we will continue to develop a roadmap around AI, but we want to be open and working with that open ecosystem and market and not being a walled garden. That's fundamentally what we believe. Okay, right. Um, maybe if I just finish off. So thank you everyone that's joined us today, there are some handouts and some little call to actions you could call that we have invested in independent study around a composable Exp buyer's guide that's available for everyone that's joined us today. And so being you're going to be a OMR 24 I think in the next few weeks or so. So, um, please say hello to Sabine if you're on site at that event in Hamburg. Well, on that note, thank you all for joining us and have a good morning. Good afternoon or good evening. Thank you again. You take care. Thank you very much. Bye.