How to choose a digital experience platform (DXP)

Choosing a digital experience platform (DXP) starts with understanding what your customers need and what your teams need to deliver it. Set clear business goals, identify the capabilities and integrations that matter most, and compare platforms using real customer journeys. Include the full cost of running the platform and the support your teams will need to make it successful.

Think about the last time a customer moved from an email to your website, or from a mobile app to a support conversation. They expected your brand to keep up. Meeting that expectation takes coordination across teams and the technology behind each interaction. A digital experience platform helps connect that work. The right fit depends on your organization. You may need to launch content faster across regions, make better use of customer insights, or give marketers more control over everyday improvements. For an enterprise managing multiple brands and markets, those needs also come with shared standards and local responsibilities.

Before you start comparing vendors, get clear on where progress is difficult today and what a better experience would look like. Use those priorities to guide the questions you ask and the demonstrations you request. You’ll be better equipped to choose a platform that your teams can use confidently and build on over time.

Before you start booking demos, bring the right people together to agree on what you need. Answering these six questions will help you give vendors a clear brief and keep the evaluation focused on your business.

1. Who needs to be involved in the decision?

Include the people who will use the platform and those responsible for connecting, securing, and supporting it. Marketing and IT should help shape the requirements, with input from regional teams, procurement, and other functions affected by the decision. Agree on who owns the final choice and how you’ll resolve competing priorities. Involving everyday users early also helps you spot practical requirements that can get lost in a procurement checklist.

2. What business outcomes do you want to improve?

Be specific about what success would look like. If regional launches take too long, establish how long they take today and where delays occur. If a priority customer journey loses people along the way, identify the points of friction and the measures you want to improve. Record a baseline and agree on realistic targets. These will help you assess vendors and give your implementation team a clear direction.

3. Which capabilities do you need first?

Start with the customer journeys and everyday tasks that matter most. Identify the capabilities needed to support them, then separate essential requirements from improvements that can follow later.
Consider what you already have. A new DXP may need to work with an existing asset library, analytics platform, or commerce system. Knowing which capabilities you intend to retain will help you define the scope and avoid paying twice for the same job.

4. How do your teams create and manage experiences?

Look closely at how work moves from an initial request to publication and ongoing improvement. Who creates content? Who approves it? What can regional teams change, and where do they need support? Document the workflows your platform needs to support, including localization, asset reuse, and any AI-assisted work. Identify unnecessary handoffs you want to remove. This gives vendors a practical basis for demonstrating how their platform would fit your organization.

5. What information do you need to make better decisions?

Decide what your teams need to understand about customer behavior and experience performance. Then identify where that information comes from, who needs access, and how they will use it. If personalization is a priority, establish which customer signals are available and appropriate to use. If you want to improve conversion, define the actions you’ll measure and how you’ll connect them to business outcomes. Include consent requirements and data access controls in the brief.

6. What does your current technology environment allow?

Map the systems your DXP will need to connect with, including CRM, commerce, analytics, and customer service tools. Record who owns each connection and any constraints that could affect delivery, such as legacy systems or limited development capacity. Agree on the budget, timing, and internal resources available for implementation and ongoing operation. A clear picture of these constraints will help you build a shortlist that your organization can realistically put to work.

Should you replatform or improve your current site?

Improving your current site is usually the practical starting point when the main problems involve content, navigation, page design, or conversion journeys and your platform can support the changes. Replatforming becomes worth evaluating when underlying limitations repeatedly prevent progress, such as unsupported technology, restrictive content models, unreliable performance, or integrations that are costly to maintain.

Before committing, ask your team to scope the priority improvements on the existing platform. Compare that work with the full cost and disruption of migration, including content changes, integrations, training, and ongoing operations. A phased approach may let you replace the capabilities causing the greatest difficulty first.

An enterprise DXP should support the way your teams manage content, personalize experiences, and measure results across brands and markets. It also needs to connect with your existing systems and give you appropriate control over publishing, customer data, and AI-assisted work. With your requirements agreed, you can start looking closely at what each platform offers. Ask vendors to demonstrate your priority workflows and explain what comes included, what requires another product, and what your team or implementation partner will need to build.

You can use this checklist to guide those conversations and give the most attention to capabilities that support your business goals.

Give each vendor the same priority tasks to demonstrate, and involve the people who will use the platform. Ask what comes included, where additional development is needed, and who will maintain the solution after launch. Use the answers to compare how well each platform fits your team’s everyday work and the resources you have available.

How to choose a DXP for global AI-driven marketing

For enterprise marketing teams adopting AI, the most important platform capabilities connect AI to everyday work: access to approved brand content, configurable review controls, and a clear path from content creation to publishing and measurement. Global organizations also need support for regional operations and tools marketers can use independently once the platform is configured.

Ask vendors to demonstrate a campaign using your own content and regional requirements. Follow the work from the initial brief through publication, and check where teams need to switch tools or rely on custom development.

What to evaluate	What to ask vendors to demonstrate
Brand context	Show how AI uses approved brand guidance and source material when generating content, and how reviewers check the output.
Regional execution	Adapt a campaign for another market, including translation and local review. Show how regional teams work within shared brand standards.
Human oversight	Demonstrate who can generate, edit, approve, and publish content. Show how teams trace changes and review AI actions.
Personalization and measurement	Use audience information to deliver a relevant experience, then show how marketers test it and measure results against a defined goal.
AI discoverability	Show how teams identify gaps in AI answers about their brand and turn those findings into content changes they can publish and monitor.
Integration and total cost	Identify the connections to existing systems and explain which capabilities require additional licenses, usage fees, or implementation work.
Enterprise scalability	Show how the platform manages your expected number of sites, markets, users, and content items. Ask for performance evidence, service commitments, and relevant implementation references.
Usability for marketers	Have a marketer adapt and publish a campaign using configured components and workflows. Identify which tasks require developer support or specialist training.

 

SitecoreAI is worth shortlisting when your priority is to connect AI-assisted marketing with the content and experience workflows your teams already manage. The platform brings together SitecoreAI CMS, digital asset management, content operations, audience insights, and conversion optimization. Its Agentic Studio supports agents grounded in brand context, with review controls that help teams oversee their work. Use the demonstration to establish what your organization can run from day one, what needs configuration, and how much effort each regional rollout will require.

What should you include in the cost of a DXP?

The total cost of a DXP includes the platform subscription, implementation, and the ongoing work needed to run and improve it. Ask vendors and implementation partners to explain those costs over the same period, using consistent assumptions about your sites, users, content, and traffic.

Include content migration, integrations, training, and the time your own teams will contribute. Establish which capabilities are included in the proposal and which require additional products or services.

Look at how costs could change as adoption grows. Adding markets, increasing usage, or expanding AI-assisted workflows may affect charges, depending on the commercial model. Ask what triggers an increase and how your team can monitor usage.

Consider those costs alongside the outcomes you agreed at the start. Faster publishing or reduced manual work can create value, but your business case should explain how you will measure that improvement and what it will take to achieve it.

Once you’ve settled on a preferred DXP, the real work begins. As with any new technology, excellent communication and training are critical to driving end-user adoption.

Before committing, resolve any outstanding questions about critical workflows or integrations through a focused proof of concept. Agree on what success looks like and involve the people who will use the platform. Keep an eye on the objectives that you established during the planning stage, so you’ll have a clear picture of the before and after comparison. For example, you may want to measure and document whether time-to-market has accelerated or customer satisfaction has improved. Take the time to gather real-time feedback, so you can adjust the implementation and rollout as needed to maximize ROI.

Results should be tied to the problem the investment was intended to solve. General Assembly reports a threefold increase in visitor-to-lead conversion and 12.5% faster page loads following its move to a composable SitecoreAI platform. Use customer evidence to understand the scope of the implementation and the outcomes measured, then establish your own baseline and targets.

Start with a rollout your teams can support, with clear ownership of content, integrations, and publishing decisions. Use what you learn from the first launch to improve the next. Over time, your DXP should make it easier for marketers to deliver useful experiences and respond to customer needs, with results you can measure against the goals that justified the investment.