Partner close-up 2026: keep up, don't slow down. Optimizely certainly isn't.

 "AI won't replace you, but someone using AI will." That line, or some version of it, kept coming back through the day at Partner Close-up 2026, and it set the tone for everything that followed. 

Writing as an Optimizely MVP, I came in expecting a roadmap update. What I got was something sharper: a future focussed view of where Optimizely is heading, and why the partners and practitioners in the room need to move with it. Shafqat's opening keynote was a genuinely inspirational intro. Not just about Optimizely, but about where the whole tech industry is going. 
 
One of the first points was 'There's process behind the magic', you can't just expect AI to be this immediate mind reader capable of everything that you currently do. Just like if you were hiring someone new, you must provide a process: rules, guardrails, instructions, guides, examples. Without the process, your output will be poor and not what you want. AI doesn't fix lazy, nor should it be making you lazy. AI only compounds lazy. 
 
My key takeaway from this session: AI is helping us do things we were never able to do before. Be creative, push yourself to think 'what would make this process better than ever?', take that, think it through with your Claude and do it. Be brave.  For me in QA, this is taking test cases that I have always wanted to execute, but never had the availability to do so. I can think through the test with Claude and execute it within minutes, expanding our test coverage into critical areas that would otherwise go untested. 
 
Important distinction here: it's not a replacement for humans; it's an enabler, a tool for augmentation. Falling behind now means being left behind permanently. 

Tech tracks

The room then split into three tracks: Business, Tech, Experimentation. I went to Tech, because that's where the practitioners are and where the detail that actually matters for delivery lives. The tech track covered some real-world innovations and next steps.

OCP and SaaS UI extensions

We started with a reintroduction to Optimizely Connect Platform (OCP). OCP is becoming more important than ever, providing a stable ground for extending your Optimizely suite. OCP houses a collection of pre-built integrations, but most importantly provides an SDK and CLI tool to help you build and ship to OCP. OCP makes it easy with a hosted infrastructure. 
 
OCP tools are data integrations, data ingestion points, and coming soon, UI extensions for SaaS CMS. 
 
UI extensions are coming to bring the customisation and extensibility that we're used to with PaaS into SaaS. UI extensions come in 3 flavours: Sidebar apps, Full screen apps, and Custom property editors. 
 
Sidebar apps live within the same window as the content you're viewing. Think SEO tools, research windows, etc. It’s almost the new world version of PaaS Widgets. 
 
Full screen apps are a level above, bringing a SaaS version of the custom tools we are used to from PaaS. Think reports, redirect managers, analytics dashboards, etc. 
 
Property editors are filling a gap that we noticed early in the SaaS lifecycle, coming soon we will be able to extend the SaaS editor UI with new types, bringing a richer experience to content modelling and editing. Think colour pickers, map UIs, API-driven dropdowns. The kinds of editor experiences PaaS devs have built for years, now native to SaaS.  

Each of these new extensions are powered by Graph to provide up-to-date content at each step. Managed through OCP, SaaS extensions are fully versioned and sandboxed in the UI, so no bad actors can get at your content. Taken together, this is the moment SaaS CMS stops being the lighter sibling of PaaS and becomes its own credible enterprise platform: extensible, secure, and on the same Graph-powered footing as everything else.

Opal in CMS 

Next up, we saw how Opal and CMS can work together to orchestrate and build content. Opal CMS tools, already available in SaaS CMS but coming soon to PaaS, offer all the key content operation points: Create, update, delete. Hooking into existing CMS content webhooks (update, save, publish), we can drive workflows in Opal to meaningfully automate content operations. Think: a scan for brand tone of voice, accessibility conformance, SEO best practices - all managed by Opal automatically. Using the extensible tools, agents and skills in Opal, anything is possible. One key caveat worth flagging directly: PaaS Opal tools will only be available for CMS 13, which shares foundational structure with SaaS. If your clients are on PaaS, the CMS 13 upgrade just got more strategically important.

Developer enablement

We then saw the power of the latest Opti-backed SDKs: the .NET Graph SDK and Content JS SDK. .net Graph SDK takes the syntax and structure we're used to from Search & nav and improves it for a Graph-based world. We're seeing the re-intro of Best Bets in the form of Pinned, and search tracking is back! Graph is really starting to overtake S&N in all the best ways. 

The biggest announcement in this session, though, was native RAG built directly into Graph. This isn't just for Search. It's for your site users, and for Opal too, which will be able to interrogate your content via RAG for smarter, context-aware results. For Opal-curious partners, this is the piece that changes the equation. RAG stops being something you have to bolt on and starts being something Optimizely ships. Content JS SDK provides everything you need to spin up a headless frontend in minutes. Using the new CMS CLI tool, types are synced between TypeScript and CMS at the push of a button to ensure solid type safe code. No more fumbling to manually match content types between FE and CMS. These new tools are AI-friendly too, with skills available to plug straight into your preferred AI coding agent.

Rounding out

What's clear from the day is that AI isn't a side bet for Optimizely anymore. It's the centre of where they're going, not just in CMS but across the whole DX sphere. It's not a fad, it's not optional, and the partners who treat it that way will be left behind. 
 
If you're trying to work out where AI fits in your marketing ops, we're spending a lot of time on this at MSQ DX. We’d love to connect!