Free certification program signals a turning point in how enterprise marketing teams are moving from AI experimentation to real-world, scalable adoption.
More than 1,100 marketing and digital leaders signed up for Optimizely‘s Opal University within its first two weeks, with a waitlist for future cohorts now exceeding 1,500 — a sign of surging enterprise demand for structured, hands-on AI training.
Optimizely, which describes itself as a leading digital experience platform provider, launched Opal University as a free, five-day certification program for senior marketing leaders. Participants are guided through building three AI agents tailored to their organization’s workflows, with an emphasis on immediate, practical impact.
In its first two cohorts, more than 60 participants built 375 AI agents in five days. Early results have been striking: participants reported between 80% and 95% time savings across recurring weekly workflows. A CRO prioritization process that previously took several hours was reduced to 30 minutes; performance benchmarking dropped from six hours to 18 minutes; and prospect research that once consumed hours each week can now be completed in two minutes.
“The teams that are actually winning with AI right now are focusing on change management and ensuring adoption happens not just because of top-down push but because marketers can get time back to create and optimize powerful campaigns,” said Allison Skidmore, Chief Customer Officer at Optimizely. She added that when marketers build agents suited to their own workflows, adoption follows naturally — because they feel the benefit directly.
Participants span a broad range of global enterprises, including Canva, Asana, LinkedIn, Zoom, DocuSign, KPMG, Deloitte, Bloomberg, EY, and Foot Locker.
Agents built across both cohorts covered a wide range of marketing functions: 70 for SEO, GEO, and AI search optimization; 39 for content operations; 30 for conversion rate optimization and experimentation; 28 for research and intelligence; 26 for customer success and sales; 16 for compliance and QA; and 14 for productivity and operations.
The strong uptake reflects a persistent challenge across the industry. While AI adoption continues to grow, most organizations remain in the early stages of applying it in a structured, repeatable way. Optimizely’s answer is its Opal platform, which embeds agentic AI directly into its suite, connecting content creation, campaign management, experimentation, and personalization into a single workflow.
“Most teams are still running AI in pockets because MarTech has become too complex for it to work any other way,” said Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizely. “What Opal does is absorb that complexity — the governance, the brand context, the orchestration — so teams can build agents that understand their brand, their data, and their processes, and reuse them across the whole organization.”
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The company says its platform benchmarks reflect that shift, reporting a 79% increase in experiment velocity, an 85% increase in campaigns delivered, a 54% faster speed to market, and an 80% increase in pages created.
Opal University will continue as an ongoing program with weekly cohorts. Participants receive certification, access to a dedicated community, and early access to new features and agents. In 2026 alone, Optimizely has launched more than 15 out-of-the-box agents designed to support GEO performance, competitive analysis, and experimentation programs.