Optimizely launches AI helpers with job titles and its own marketing models

Optimizely used its Opticon conference in New York this week to change what its Opal AI system does. Until now it handled single tasks. The company now wants it to act more like a member of staff. On August 31 it launched Virtual Teammates, five AI characters that each have a job description. On September 1 it added AI models built just for marketing, plus a free test set called Mark-Bench.

The five roles are a chief of staff that gets meetings and briefings ready, an analyst for search and AI search, a marketing analyst, a personalisation strategist, and a manager for conversion rate optimisation, meaning the work of getting more website visitors to buy. A chatbot waits for someone to type a question. These run on a timetable instead. They remember what they have learned about the company, hold their own permissions and keep a record of every action. Kevin Li, Optimizely’s senior vice president of product, said they “carry the work through to execution.”

The company says the launch answers a problem of too many tools. Its survey of more than 2,000 leaders in business-to-business marketing found that 81% switch between two or more AI tools that do not talk to each other every week. A further 19% use four or more. Some 53% said their current tools pick up facts about the brand but miss the feeling behind it.

Optimizely says its Mark-IQ models cost ten times less to run

The second announcement is the one people may argue about. Optimizely’s marketing models are fed by a data layer called Mark-IQ, which pulls in the history of past tests and website analytics. The company says they are about ten times cheaper to run than the big general AI models on marketing tasks. On Mark-Bench, which covers 285 tasks across 15 areas of marketing with more than 6,000 grading criteria, the company says its Agent Platform passed 67% of tasks against 60% for Anthropic’s Claude Code, at half the cost. The test is open source, so rivals and customers can check the claim. A test built by a vendor usually suits that vendor’s own way of working.

The move puts Optimizely up against Adobe’s agent “coworkers” and Salesforce’s Agentforce. Optimizely came top of Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for digital experience platforms, ahead of Adobe. Opal had nearly 1,700 customers and more than 172,000 agent runs by May. Its annual recurring revenue, meaning one year’s worth of subscription income, was up 42% on the quarter before.

Optimizely has not said what Virtual Teammates will cost

Optimizely has not said what Virtual Teammates will cost. Its executives said openly that the habit of marketers copying AI output from one tool into another is on the way out. President Shafqat Islam went further and suggested the marketing job as it looks today may not stay the same. Marketing chiefs will want to know whether helpers with permissions and timetables cut the number of staff or simply take on the dull work, as they look at the plans.