Sitecore’s Agentic Tasting Menu

Pull up a chair, ignore the wobble in that table leg, and let me present today’s special: Sitecore’s quietly ambitious move into agentic AI. Think of it as a kitchen refit while the dining room is still full, with a new brigade of robot sous-chefs that never call in sick and only sometimes flambé the tablecloth.

This is a tasting menu, so we’ll move briskly. Aperitif in hand, let’s tour the courses: Agent API, Marketer MCP, AXP (the contextual assistant), Agentic Studio, and a side of Marketplace tapas. Oh, and for dessert, a controversy-free serving of Content Hub vs XM Cloud pairing notes.

Amuse-bouche: Why Agentic matters (and why your AI keeps burning the roux)

Most AI in content ops is a polite intern: it drafts, it suggests, it nods. Agentic AI is the line cook who reads the ticket, fetches the mise en place, plates it, gets sign-off, and sends it. Still with a human pass, still with guardrails, but crucially able to take multi-step actions in your actual systems.

That shift—from predictive to procedural—is the difference between “help me write a blog” and “create a landing page, spin variants, attach the right assets, schedule, and get legal approval.” Sitecore is wiring the kitchen so those agents can legally use the knives.

Course 1: Agent API — “The pass” where orders move

If your content stack is a restaurant, the Agent API is the pass. It’s where structured tickets get picked up and translated into actions without hauling the entire GraphQL pantry into the prompt.

• What it’s for: Let agents create and update content, pull site info, handle localization parameters, and work through predictable steps without bespoke duct tape each time.
• Why it matters: Agents need a simple, LLM-friendly contract to act reliably. The Agent API abstracts complexity so you can automate “create page → populate content → preview → submit for approval → publish” without hand-feeding a 40-step recipe to your model every time.
• Chef’s tip: Treat it like a service layer for orchestration. Keep your prompts thin, your actions robust, and your audits visible.

Course 2: Marketer MCP — Model Context Protocol as your kitchen door

MCP is the swinging door between the LLM brain and your back-of-house systems. It defines the “tools” agents can use, how to call them, with what inputs and outputs, and under which house rules.

• What it’s for: Securely exposing Sitecore capabilities to agent frameworks, so your agent doesn’t try to flambé the staging site on Friday at 4:59 pm.
• Why it matters: Standardized tool contracts make it easier to build complex, multi-step flows that combine internal data, external sources, and Sitecore actions.
• Real talk: MCPs work best when scoped. Think “knife roll,” not “everything drawer.” Smaller, purposeful toolkits produce more reliable agents.

Course 3: AXP — The contextual maître d’

AXP (Agentic Experience Platform) is the assistant that shows up wherever you are and offers contextually relevant actions. Editing a page? It suggests improving copy, generating variants, or pulling insights. In the asset library? It proposes tagging, compliance checks, or localization.

• What it’s for: Meeting marketers and practitioners where they work, not making them climb into six different admin screens.
• Why it matters: Adoption. AI that hides in sidebars dies in sidebars. AXP turns intelligence into immediate, inline actions.

Course 4: Agentic Studio — Build-your-own-brigade

This is the part where Sitecore lets you assemble your own flow agents. Out-of-the-box patterns for sales, insights, and ABM campaigns, plus the ability to compose custom flows: brief intake, data lookups, asset generation, approvals, and go-live steps.

• What it’s for: Repeatable automations that your team can reason about, modify, and approve. Think “recipes,” not black-box magic.
• Why it matters: Scale. If your best ops person can define the happy path and the safety checks once, an agent can run it reliably a hundred times.

Side plate: Marketplace tapas (order two, regret nothing)

Native-feel apps and AI skills that live inside the product. Translation helpers. Bulk editors. Import-export wizards. The rule of thumb: if it feels like a connector, it’s boring; if it changes the day-to-day for a marketer inside Sitecore, it’s delicious.

• What to build: Anything that shortens handoffs and reduces “did we…?” moments. Simulation, rollback, audit trails. If it prints a clean chit at the pass, it’s a hit.

Pairing notes: XM Cloud vs Content Hub

• XM Cloud: Pages, components, personalization, publishing. This is your front-of-house plating, where ABM campaigns and microsites live. Agent API and the first wave of MCPs are strongest here today.
• Content Hub: Assets, metadata, variants, rights, and governance. It’s the pantry and cold line. Expect growing MCP coverage so agents can fetch, tag, validate, and localize without turning your taxonomy into alphabetical soup.

Pro move: Build flows that cross the divide. “Brief-to-campaign” means CH assets plus XM structure, with approvals that keep brand and legal sane.

Chef’s table: What good agentic flows look like

• Clear ticket: outcome, constraints, and a target state. “German variant for Q4 landing page with approved lifestyle imagery, rights valid through Jan 31.”
• Guardrails baked in: required fields, brand kit checks, legal phrases, rights windows, and language switches.
• Human pass: multi-step automations culminating in a review that is fast, not performative.
• Observability: every step logged. When a VP asks “who added the parsley,” you have the receipt.

Pitfalls to avoid (yes, we’ve spilled this soup before)

• Kitchen sink MCPs: overstuffed toolkits that confuse agents and humans alike. Scope by job-to-be-done.
• Prompt spaghetti: burying business rules in prose. Move policy into the action layer where it can be versioned and tested.
• Sidecar UX: agents that live in a modal nobody opens. Surface actions where work already happens.
• Silent failures: if a step fails and nobody hears it, did it even error? Alerts, retries, and graceful degradation are non-negotiable.

Recipes you can serve today

• Migration mise en place: An MCP-powered pipeline that ingests files from S3 or SharePoint, de-duplicates, maps metadata to Content Hub, and runs rights checks before seating the assets.
• Brief-to-plate flow: Take a brand brief, propose copy and components, select assets from CH, generate locales, submit for approvals, and publish to XM. All auditable. No smoke alarm.
• Tag sommelier: An assistant that proposes taxonomy, flags drift, and warns when your sparkling-water tag is being used for still images again.

The bill, please: What this means for teams

• Marketers: More doing, fewer opening tickets. You keep the taste, agents do the chopping.
• Ops: Policies become code. Approvals shift left. Incidents get traceable.
• Devs: You’re building sturdy counters and sharp knives, not bespoke one-off appliances. APIs, MCPs, and simple contracts win.

Final bite

Agentic AI done right isn’t magic. It’s mise en place. Sitecore’s stack, Agent API, MCP, AXP, and Agentic Studio turn prompts into personalized experiences with a human pass and a clean audit trail. It won’t make your copy go viral, but it will make your operation calm, predictable, and faster than the table that ordered after you.

If your current workflow feels like a tasting menu served in random order, it might be time to invite a few well-behaved agents into the kitchen. Just don’t let them near the crème brûlée torch unsupervised.