Unlike task-based AI tools, Optimizely’s new Virtual Teammates retain context, hold defined roles, and proactively complete recurring marketing work.
Optimizely, an AI platform for marketing, on Aug. 31 announced Virtual Teammates, a new class of digital coworkers designed to work alongside marketers across day-to-day workflows. Unveiled at the company’s Opticon conference, Virtual Teammates can take on defined responsibilities, retain organizational knowledge over time, and proactively complete work without requiring marketers to prompt an AI tool task by task.
The launch addresses a growing challenge for marketing teams: AI adoption has increased, but so has the burden of managing an expanding set of disconnected tools. In a recent global Optimizely study of more than 2,000 B2B marketing leaders, 81% said they personally switch between two or more disconnected AI tools each week, including 19% who use four or more. Rather than adding another standalone tool, Virtual Teammates are designed to function as ongoing members of the marketing team.
Each Virtual Teammate has a defined role, set of responsibilities and organizational permissions. Marketers can assign them work, include them in conversations and workflows, and configure recurring responsibilities triggered by schedules or events. Over time, the teammates retain relevant context from previous conversations, projects and decisions, reducing the need for marketers to repeatedly re-explain how their organization works.
“Marketers want to grow their business, not spend time re-explaining it to multiple AI tools,” said Alex Atzberger, Optimizely’s CEO. “A Virtual Teammate learns how your organization works once, then keeps going. This is the most exciting innovation since the introduction of agents.”
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At launch, Optimizely is introducing Virtual Teammates for five common marketing roles:
- Chief of Staff: Helps marketers prepare for meetings, track follow-ups, monitor competitive intelligence and deliver recurring briefings.
- SEO & AI Search Analyst: Monitors search and AI visibility, audits answer engine optimization performance, identifies opportunities, and reports on actions taken.
- Marketing Analyst: Turns marketing data into decision-ready insights by monitoring acquisition, content performance and conversion trends.
- Personalization Strategist: Identifies personalization opportunities, designs and builds campaigns, and monitors performance to recommend next steps.
- CRO Manager: Analyzes experiments and performance to identify areas for improvement and recommend actions for marketers to investigate.
Organizations can select role-specific Virtual Teammates from a directory, hiring and customizing pre-built teammates with role-based expertise rather than building agents and workflows from scratch. Teams can adapt each teammate’s responsibilities in plain language and connect it to the systems it needs to perform its work.
Virtual Teammates can also operate on a schedule — a Chief of Staff, for example, might deliver a weekly briefing or surface background details ahead of a meeting, while an SEO Analyst could continuously monitor search visibility and flag issues that need attention. Because each teammate retains context over time, Optimizely said, subsequent assignments build on prior work and decisions rather than starting fresh.
Organizations retain control through individually scoped permissions and built-in oversight, with companies able to designate where human review is required. Each Virtual Teammate’s activity is tied to its own identity, which the company said allows actions to be traced back for accountability.
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“A lot of AI adoption stalls out because getting from idea to finished work is still hard. Even when the AI does its part, you don’t always know who did what, or trust it enough to let it act on its own,” said Kevin Li, Optimizely’s senior vice president of product. “That’s why we built Virtual Teammates with their own identity and permissions from day one. They carry the work through to execution, and every action ties back to a clear audit trail.”
Virtual Teammates extend Optimizely’s existing Opal agent platform, moving AI from individual prompts and isolated tasks toward persistent, proactive support across marketing workflows.
