The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

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Optimizely updates OpaI

May 7, 2025 /

Optimizely, a digital experience platform (DXP) provider, introduced the next evolution of Optimizely Opal. With an all-new user interface and a direct embed across the Optimizely One product suite, Opal unlocks use cases for marketing and digital teams—from task automation, to brand content creation, and experimentation analysis.

Opal builds context windows by combining diverse data sources from an organization’s corporate knowledge, including existing assets, campaign performance, and experimentation results. Opal is enhanced by Optimizely’s domain expertise incorporating content and experimentation practices. Opal agents leverage dozens of tools built for marketing that integrate with external systems. Users can fine-tune with custom instructions and orchestrate these agents within workflows. Enhancements include:

  • A redesigned platform experience puts marketers in control with features like Instructions, a dedicated user interface to manage new and pre-built agents, and Chat which is persistent across all Optimizely products.
  • A pre-built tool library helps marketers with analyzing webpages, creating presentation decks, and conducting keyword research.
  • Specialized agents for marketing tasks, each equipped with instructions and tools to deliver results or complete actions on marketers’ behalf.
  • Agent workflows allow admins to combine multiple Specialized Agents to work together—either step-by-step or at the same time.

https://www.optimizely.com/ai

Bloomreach adds marketing and e-commerce features

May 6, 2025 /

Bloomreach, an agentic platform for personalization, announced features to transform AI-driven personalization and customer engagement across marketing and product discovery. From workflows to conversational search, these features highlight agentic AI.

Marketing:

  • Autonomous Marketing Agents: AI-powered agents to help marketers automate and execute the entire campaign creation process.
  • Recommendations+ : Analyzes each customer’s journey and behavior in real-time to recommend products that align with a customer’s preferences.
  • Contextual Personalization: Automates personalization through the delivery of individualized emails, mobile messages and onsite experiences to each customer.

⠀Conversational Shopping:

  • Search Triggered Conversations: Launches a personalized conversation directly from the search bar and acts as an integrated shopping assistant.
  • Embedded Conversations: Brings Clarity’s conversational capabilities directly to Product Detail Pages (PDPs) and Product Listing Pages (PLPs).

⠀Search:

  • Personalization Studio: Learns from live customer signals and optimizes in real-time to reflect current shopper intent.
  • Ranking Studio: Gives practitioners control to integrate critical business signals like margins or offline sales into search algorithms.
  • Multi-language search: Expands global reach by extending autonomous search across 33 supported languages.
  • Conditional Slot Merchandising: Elevates product placement by allowing the merchandiser to define their own business-driven conditions so AI can autonomously populate product grids and placements.

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-unveils-the-features-ushering-in-the-agentic-era-of-marketing-and-ecommerce/

OpenSearch releases OpenSearch 3.0

May 6, 2025 /

The OpenSearch Software Foundation, the vendor-neutral home for the OpenSearch Project, announced the general availability of OpenSearch 3.0. OpenSearch 3.0 enables users to increase efficiency, deliver superior performance, and accelerate AI application development via new data management, AI agent, and vector search capabilities.

Vector engine features:

  • GPU Acceleration for OpenSearch Vector Engine: Delivers superior performance for large-scale vector workloads while significantly lowering operational spend by reducing index building time.
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) support.
  • Derived Source: Reduces storage consumption by removing redundant vector data sources and utilizing primary data to recreate source documents.

⠀Data management features:

  • Support for gRPC: Enables faster and more efficient data transport and data processing for OpenSearch deployments.
  • Pull-based Ingestion: Enhances ingestion efficiency and gives OpenSearch more control over the flow of data and when it’s retrieved by decoupling data sources and data consumers.
  • Reader and Writer Separation: Ensures consistent, high-quality performance for indexing and search workloads by configuring each in isolation.
  • Apache Calcite Integration.
  • Index Type Detection: automatically determining whether an OpenSearch index contains log-related data and speeding up log analysis feature selection.

Other updates include: Lucene 10, Java 21 minimum supported Runtime, and Java Platform Module System Support.

https://opensearch.org/blog/unveiling-opensearch-3-0

Gilbane Advisor 4-30-25 — Normal AI, vibe blogging, zero-copy

April 30, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan, and Philip Guo.

Additional reading comes from Steve Jones, Alberto Romero, Shawn Wang & Alessio Fanelli, and Anthony Chavez.

News comes from Adobe, Access Innovations, Syncro Soft, and Elastic.

Our next issue arrives May 14.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

AI as normal technology

“We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.”

This paper by Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan has been getting a lot of attention, not because it is radical, but because it is a grounded, reasoned, centered, and promising worldview of AI. An important read. (73 min)

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Vibe coding, vibe checking, and vibe blogging

Using generative AI for personal-scale projects

I’ve experimented with a few GenAI writing tools but haven’t found a productive use for them — too much untrusting micromanagement by me — so haven’t even considered code generation or vibe coding. That is until I read this piece by Philip Guo describing his experiment with vibe coding, and tips for building trust with vibe checking. (10 min)

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/vibe-coding-vibe-checking-and-vibe-blogging

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Adobe announces updated Firefly

Firefly combines new Firefly image and video models and the choice of models from partners including Google Cloud and OpenAI. Firefly Boards are in beta.
https://news.adobe.com/news//2025/04/adobe-delivers-creative-pros-unparalleled-speed-precision-flexibility

Access Innovations releases catalogue of 53 Knowledge Domains

The Knowledge Domain products can enhance content prior to ingestion into large language models (LLMs) and will provide improved GPT outputs.
https://www.accessinn.com/2025/04/24/releasing-catalog-of-53-knowledge-domains/

Syncro Soft releases Oxygen Content Fusion 8.1

Version 8.1 streamlines DITA content management and collaboration, with flexible project creation, enhanced file comparison and merging, and new AI-enabled features.
https://www.oxygenxml.com/content_fusion/whats_new.html

Elastic’s Cloud Serverless now on Google Cloud Marketplace

Elastic Cloud Serverless provides a fast way to start and scale security, observability, and search solutions without managing infrastructure.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-serverless-google-cloud-general-availability

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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Syncro Soft releases Oxygen Content Fusion 8.1

April 24, 2025 /

Syncro Soft, developer of the Oxygen XML suite of products, released Oxygen Content Fusion 8.1, a web-based collaboration platform for content creation and review. Version 8.1 is focused on streamlining DITA content management and collaboration by introducing more flexible project creation, enhanced file comparison and merging capabilities, and new AI-enabled features through integration with the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant 5.0.

  • Users can start projects immediately even before linking to a Git repository and create them from predefined templates. Publications from existing DITA-OT project files can be imported and used for editing and validation context.
  • The file comparison and merging tool includes a Differences View to track replies and review comments. Ignoring white-spaces enables focusing on meaningful content differences, rather than cosmetic formatting changes.
  • With AI Positron Assistant 5.0 integration users can attach Word, PowerPoint, and PDF files for context in AI interactions. The DITA document conversion and topic analysis enables restructuring and updating content.
  • Custom AI actions can be developed or existing ones filtered to suit specialized use cases. An external text or Markdown file may be leveraged for prompts.
  • Updated components include the latest Oxygen XML Web Author 27.1.0 for visual XML editing and Oxygen Publishing Engine 27.1.

https://www.oxygenxml.com/content_fusion/whats_new.html

Access Innovations releases catalogue of 53 Knowledge Domains

April 24, 2025 /

Access Innovations, Inc, provider of Data Harmony software solutions, has announced its catalogue of more than 50 Knowledge Domains are now available as stand-alone products for use in thesauri or taxonomies.

A Knowledge Domain is an outline of expertise for a specific topical or content area formatted as a taxonomy (hierarchy) or thesaurus (with full records for every term). Knowledge Domains enhance knowledge management systems by enabling tagging, improving search accuracy, supporting web navigation, facilitating and semantic fingerprinting.

Knowledge Domains are designed to immediately improve the workflow efficiency of existing knowledge management systems by reducing search times and yielding more relevant search results. For new systems, Knowledge Domains can provide a fast plug-and-play solution or be an ideal starting point from which to create a narrower, custom taxonomy.

Domains include a Medicinal Plant Names Service (MPNS) domain developed in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew that has an average of 16.6 synonyms per plant name and a NASA database that contains the authorized subject terms by which the documents in the NASA Aeronautics and Space Database are indexed and retrieved.

Medical domains include current diagnostic codes from the American Medical Association for medical coding and payment, the International Classification of Diseases maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, and others.

 https://www.accessinn.com/knowledge-domains/

Adobe announces updated Firefly

April 24, 2025 /

Adobe updated Firefly, their all-in-one app for AI-assisted content ideation, creation and production. Firefly empowers creators to generate images, video, audio and vectors from a single place with creative control, iterate on their creations across Adobe’s creative apps and seamlessly deliver them into production. The choice of partner models includes Google Cloud and OpenAI and AI-powered tools deeply integrated into Creative Cloud apps.

Firefly includes all of Adobe’s commercially safe creative AI models, including the new Firefly Image Model 4 for lifelike images, the new Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra for detail and complexity and the Firefly Video Model which generates footage from text prompts and images with creative control.

Firefly also provides creative professionals with the choice to explore in different aesthetic styles using models from partners, with Google Cloud and OpenAI models available today and models from partners including fal .ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika and Runway available in the coming months. The all-new Firefly Boards, now in public beta in Firefly, gives creators an AI-first surface for moodboarding, exploring creative concepts, iterating on hundreds of variations at once and collaborating on ideation. 

Creators can use Firefly on the web today, with the mobile app coming soon.

https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/firefly/gen-ai-approach.html

Elastic’s Cloud Serverless now on Google Cloud Marketplace

April 24, 2025 /

From the Elastic blog…

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Google Cloud — now available in the Iowa (us-central1) region. Elastic Cloud Serverless provides the fast way to start and scale observability, security, and search solutions without managing infrastructure. Built on the Search AI Lake architecture, which leverages Google Cloud Storage, it combines storage, separate storage and compute, low-latency querying, and advanced AI capabilities.

  • No compromise on speed or scale: Elasticsearch Serverless dynamically scales to accommodate your workload, handling unpredictable traffic spikes automatically — all while delivering low-latency search on boundless object storage.
  • Hassle-free operations: Say goodbye to managing clusters, provisioning nodes, or fine-tuning performance. Free your team from operational tasks — no need to manage infrastructure, do capacity planning, upgrade, or scale data. 
  • Purpose-built product experience: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a streamlined workflow to help you create projects tailored to your unique use cases in observability, security, and search. With guided onboarding, you can use in-product resources and tools that guide you every step of the way, accelerating time to value.
  • Flexible usage-based pricing model: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a usage-based pricing model that scales with your needs.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-serverless-google-cloud-general-availability

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