A year ago, Sitecore looked like a company stuck between leadership churn and reinvention theater. Today, it looks more stable, at least from the outside. Eric Stine replaced Dave O’Flanagan as CEO in May 2025, and the company’s story seems more coherent: AI-first marketing, the “agentic web,” and SitecoreAI as the new umbrella platform. It’s the expected AI pivot we’re seeing across the industry. Your mileage may vary.

But if you step back, this feels less like a clean turnaround and more like a continuation of the same pattern my colleague Tony Byrne called out in Woe Sitecore: Partners and Licensees, a company reshaping its narrative faster than it resolves its underlying structural issues. The messaging has improved. The reality behind it is still catching up.

Signs of Life

To Sitecore’s credit, there have been some wins, at least on paper. The company self-reported surpassing $500 million in ARR in fiscal 2024, and XM Cloud revenue growth of 100% sounds impressive, though off a relatively small base. Late in 2025 it introduced SitecoreAI, built on XM Cloud, along with Sitecore Studio and Pathway for AI-assisted migration. These moves show activity and investment, but they don’t yet prove a true turnaround. There is momentum here, but it still feels early, uneven, and heavily reliant on narrative as much as execution.

And, the caveats have not disappeared. Even supportive coverage of the SitecoreAI launch noted familiar complaints: practitioners continue to report integration complexity and personalization gaps, and migration challenges for customers moving to XM Cloud.

What About DAM?

The same mixed picture applies to the old Stylelabs line. Content Hub is still very much alive, and over the past year Sitecore has continued to ship the typical AI DAM features now expected in the category. That makes it clear the product has not been abandoned or quietly pushed into maintenance mode. But incremental releases alone do not answer the bigger question of whether Sitecore sees it as a true strategic platform or simply a DAM product filling out the portfolio.

Their overall strategy still feels wrongly centered. For all the AI promotion, SitecoreAI is explicitly built on the foundation of XM Cloud, and Sitecore’s own FAQ specifically outlines this. The same FAQ says Content Hub remains a separate application that is provisioned on request, not something automatically present at the center of the experience. Meanwhile Sitecore continues to publicly pledge ongoing investment in XP and XM, including plans for 10.5 and beyond, its homepage still markets XM and XP alongside the AI suite, and XP 10.4 remains in mainstream support through 2027 and extended support through 2030. Beginning June 1, 2026, Extended Support also gets more expensive in practice, with production incident support and security fixes moving behind additional paid options. In other words, Sitecore has embraced AI faster than it has let go of its older CMS lineage.

The Future?

The irony is that Sitecore itself is now describing the market correctly. In an April 2026 webinar, it argued that simply adding AI to a legacy CMS does not work and that the future CMS is less about pages and more about intelligence, context, and orchestration. DXPs are evolving into coordination layers, not just content platforms. That diagnosis is right. The problem is that SitecoreAI still feels like an agentic layer wrapped around a CMS-first inheritance, not the architectural answer that diagnosis implies.

What the market increasingly needs is what RSG calls a content warehouse: a governed, reusable system of record for assets, product content, workflows, metadata, rights, and performance signals that can feed websites, apps, commerce experiences, search results, and now AI agents and answer engines.

This is much closer to the original Stylelabs vision than to the current SitecoreAI narrative. When Sitecore acquired Stylelabs in 2018, it bought a Marketing Content Hub that integrated DAM, MRM, and PIM into a single platform. Current Sitecore materials still describe Content Hub as a centralized home base that brings these systems together; and Content Hub connectors let teams work in systems like Contentful and dozens of creative or work-management tools while keeping assets centralized. That is the kind of architecture AI actually wants: structured, governed, connected content that can be reused anywhere.

Instead, Sitecore has steadily narrowed how it presents that broader vision. Content Hub still has the underlying capabilities to act as a central content operations platform, but Sitecore increasingly packages and markets those capabilities as discrete AI-era solutions like “Sitecore AI DAM” and “Content Operations.” In practice, these are built on the same Content Hub foundation, but the messaging shifts the perception from a unified content platform to a set of point solutions. Stylelabs originally came in with a true content platform vision.

Today, that vision is still there technically, but it’s being marketed more like a DAM product with adjacent workflow features than the operational backbone it could be. When you layer on top the chronic difficulty that Sitecore DAM licensees cite in working with the vendor, it’s not a pretty picture for this part of the portfolio.

So yes, on paper Sitecore resides in a better place than it was a year ago. Leadership is steadier. The business has posted some growth metrics. SitecoreAI is not vaporware. Content Hub continues to marginally improve. But the deeper strategic mistake remains: Sitecore seems to be optimizing the wrapper instead of the core. In a market moving toward AI-native orchestration, the winning product is unlikely to be another CMS with agents attached. It is more likely to be a content warehouse: the governed operational backbone where brand truth, asset truth, product truth, workflows, and metadata live.

Sitecore bought much of that future with Stylelabs. One year later, it still seems more interested in selling SitecoreAI than in building the company around the best product idea it already has.

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