SUGCON 2025 - part one and AI

SUGCON 2025 - Antwerp, Belgium

Yeah, Sugcon in Belgium. Which meant I could attend this edition.  As it is always a pleasure to meet up with people from the Sitecore community I was really looking forward to it and it did not disappoint me.

With a venue on approximately 60km away from my doorstep there was no hotel and flight for me. Instead I got a pleasant drive... up until you get a glimpse of the Antwerp skyline which also means: traffic jams 🙂

But we got safe and sound to a very sunny Antwerp and a tremendous venue with a view on the zoo. It should be no surprise that there was another traffic jam when entering the main room for the keynote as everyone was taking pictures

So venue is fine, weather is good and the crowd very nice. Now we just need some good content as well. Ready for take-off... 

Keynotes

I must admit that the keynotes were not really mind blowing nor unforgettable. Which is to be expected on an event like this - big announcements are for Symposium. Sugcon got simple, to-the-point keynotes with the usual AI buzz words and mentions of the community as one would suspect on a community event. 

I was nice to see all the familiar faces behind Dave O'Flanagan -  with Jason in plain sight but I'm also in there somewhere 🙂. 

AI

Of course AI was present in many presentations. Whether it was to generate the images in the presentation like Jason Wilkerson or as real main focus in the CCC demo from Morten Ljungberg. 

 

Morten showed us a demo of the possibilities with Sitecore Stream - the free version and the paid version with brand awareness. It looked pretty good (although his CCC/K joke was unaware of Belgian history). But the demo was nice and gave us a pretty good idea of how these things work.

Let's continue a bit more on the AI path as Vignesh Vishwanath woke us up on Friday with his talk on Stream in XP. 

He made it very clear that there are opportunities here. It also became clear that Stream is not only for the SAAS customers, but also available to those who didn't take that step (yet).  There is a free tier available that does include the basics - probably the biggest difference is the brand awareness, if you want that you will need to subscription version. 

At the moment in the CMS you can mostly generate content, but there is a roadmap to increase the possibilities and add more functionality within the product. 

One of the things that is coming would be help in translating - but with a translation company as a sponsor he also made it clear that this is AI translations and that those are not yet perfect 🙂

There were (lots) more interesting sessions of course. And also very interesting talks during the breaks. More of that in part two...