Speakers
Regional Managing Director (EMEA & APAC)
George Smith is the Regional Managing Director at Horizontal Digital, where he oversees operations across the Middle East, India, Africa and Asia Pacific. With more than a decade of experience in digital transformation, George has been instrumental in delivering award-winning customer experiences built on Sitecore and other leading technologies. A five-time Sitecore MVP, he is passionate about using composable technology and generative AI to drive real business value. Based in Dubai, George is a published author and a frequent speaker at industry events.
Sitecore is moving into a really interesting chapter. AI is changing not just the technology we use, but how people discover, evaluate, and interact with brands. I’m looking forward to hearing how customers and partners are responding to that shift in the real world, beyond the AI hype.
And, as always, Symposium is one of the rare opportunities to get so much of the Sitecore community together in one place. Some of the best conversations tend to happen outside the sessions.
Catching up with the Sitecore community, meeting customers and partners from around the world, and hopefully finding enough time outside the agenda to enjoy Orlando.
I’ve also learned that the best Symposium conversations rarely happen where you planned them, so I’m leaving some room for serendipity.
We’re moving beyond thinking about AI simply as a tool for generating content faster. The more interesting question is how AI changes the entire content lifecycle: how content is created, structured, reused, optimized, discovered, and ultimately experienced.
With Tourism Australia, for example, that means looking at how structured content and SitecoreAI can support an AI-native content supply chain, while tools like Scrunch help us understand whether a brand is actually visible and authoritative within AI-generated answers. That creates a very different conversation with clients, because AI becomes part of the underlying experience strategy rather than a feature added on top.
Discover how we unlock greater possibilities for some of the world’s most recognized brands and their customers with our connected experience expertise.
Learn how, in just six months, enterprise software giant IFS launched its new SitecoreAI platform, delivering enhanced search, improved visuals, and optimized consumer journeys. IFS will discuss how it identified high value automation opportunities, established trust and oversight and is building a scalable operating model designed for the next generation of digital marketing.
An increasing number of brands are realizing that Adobe AEM is not delivering the value they were promised and is no longer fit for purpose at enterprise scale. Discover how TeamViewer strategically evaluated various CMS vendors, and what made SitecoreAI the correct choice. Horizontal’s Manju Lakshmaiah and Alex Ellis will share how to build a business case for migrating away from a legacy CMS, a realistic account of what a major enterprise CMS migration looks like, and the decisions that most affect go-live quality.
Multi-site experiences have always demanded consistency, governance, and strong content operations - and getting that foundation right is no small feat. In the agentic era, the bar is even higher. Join Horizontal and Raymond James as we explore how we’re partnering to modernize that foundation, creating a connected, governed model that makes it easier to launch, manage, reuse, and optimize experiences across thousands of sites. You’ll learn not only about the elements of a strong foundation, but the system required to adapt across channels and continuously evolve as technology changes.
Evolving from a primarily US brand into a global enterprise requires a tremendous amount of strategic planning. Discover how Atkore decided that XM Cloud was the platform for the next decade of their business, how the implementation process unfolded, and the next steps for further transitioning fully onto SitecoreAI.
AI visibility monitoring is becoming table stakes. The category is maturing fast, and soon every brand will see how they appear in AI answers. Once gaps are clearly visible to all, the question is no longer, “How do we measure AI visibility?”, it’s “How do we make editors act on it?” Horizontal’s Khushboo Sorthiya and Priyanka Gulia will reveal why the key is to move intelligence into the authoring moment, ensuring editors see why a page won’t be cited during the copy writing process.
