SUGCON Europe 2026 - Key Takeaways
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the SUGCON Europe 2026 in London. It was a 2-day event, conducted on April 16th and April 17th 2026, at Parka Plaza Victoria, London. It was an amazing event, full of insights into the future of Sitecore. I am sharing the key takeaways I had from the event in this article.
SitecoreAI Marketplace Code Jam
This was a pre-registered workshop event, where we built a SitecoreAI Marketplace Application live, completely with Vibe-coding. It was conducted primarily by Sebastian Winter. We used GitHub Copilot connected with Blok MCP Server and the Sitecore Docs MCP Server to build an AI Image Generator. This application was hosted on the SitecoreAI Marketplace and could be rendered on the SitecoreAI instance, full-screen or as a Widget. The workshop was very interesting and provided some brilliant insights into how we can use the Marketplace apps to extend SitecoreAI to meet our needs.
To know more about Marketplace apps, you can check the official Sitecore documentation here.
Opening Keynote
Scott Liewehr, the Global VP of Market Strategy & Growth at Sitecore, opened the event, providing us with insights about how SitecoreAI is doing in the current market.
The keynote had the following things:
Sitecore is still a leader in DXP as awarded by Gartner, Forrester, G2, & CMS Critic.
There was a special mention of all the Sitecore 2026 MVPs.
Sitecore is going to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
Tamas Varga received an Honorary MVP. And, he also announced his retirement. Good luck, Tamas. :) We are going to miss you.
Day 1 sessions
Beyond the chatbot: five AI engineering patterns from building a Sitecore code analysis engine by Nick Allen
He presented his experiences of building an automation engine.
The Automation engine was for upgrading JSS versions and migrating to Content SDK
He explained the different patterns he came across during this time.
Building AI Automations with Langchain was really interesting to learn.
Modernising at Scale: How Hexagon Rebuilt Its Digital Platform on SitecoreAI by George Chang
George presented on how Hexagon migrated to Sitecore AI.
The approach they took towards the migration was really interesting.
Conducting a Content Audit before the migration can be really beneficial.
A uniform design system across the organisation for brand identity.
Sitecore AI was chosen for being Marketer-friendly.
Built a Custom agent to rewrite and review content.
The cost savings in terms of Infrastructure can be significant.
What’s New, What’s Next, and How to Build It: A Sitecore Marketplace Roadmap Deep Dive
Romina Metnik and Christian Hahn delivered this presentation.
Sitecore Marketplace Apps are going to be the way to customise SitecoreAI as per our needs.
We will have the community building various applications for everyone to use.
The developers will also have a way to monetise their applications on the Marketplace.
We can soon expect integrations with different products being built and pushed to the Marketplace.
Day 2 sessions
Zero-Code SitecoreAI Content Operations: Autonomous Audit Engine with n8n, Marketer MCP & Claude
This session was delivered by Miguel Minoldo and Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran.
They had live demos showing how to automate content operations with n8n, Marketer MCP, and Claude.
Marketplace apps can be used to build various integration points to customise to user needs.
Marketer MCP provides some great tools for AI to read and modify your Sitecore content.
We will soon have an AI SDK to build Marketplace apps.
Triggering automations based on Webhooks or Schedules through n8n for your content operations.
Content auditing, reviewing for SEO/AEO, can be a continuous operation with n8n workflows.
n8n provides high flexibility to build workflows, low-code or with some code.
Microsoft Agent Framework and Sitecore by Peter Clisby
Peter presented how to build agents for Sitecore development with the Microsoft Agentic Framework.
The development is very familiar, considering we use C#
Models can be privately hosted on Microsoft Foundry
A multi-agent architecture can be composed for Sitecore Development
Your Content Model Is Blocking AI by Vasiliy Fomichev
SEO is no longer the only thing we need to be concerned about
A lot of search now happens through AI engines rather than Search
For this, our content models need to be optimised for AI engines
That's where AEO (AnswerEngine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) come in.
Our content will now have to be optimised for AI engines to discover it well.
Vibesitecoring: From Figma to Sitecore with Zero Lines of Code
Presented by Volodymyr Nikitin and Anton Tishchenko
The creators of the Sitecore MCP server
You can use AI to build components from Figma directly
A lot of work, such as creating the component/templates in Sitecore, and then the component in the solution, was all repetitive
AI helps you with creating the first draft of the component for a developer to tweak it properly
You use Figma MCP to read the designs and then Sitecore MCP to build the components within Sitecore
Agents can be built, and they interact with each other for the whole flow
Building SitecoreAI-based Portals with Extranet Security through a Marketplace App by Jesper Belle
Permission Management for your Front-end has become increasingly difficult with Sitecore AI
Now that we don't have our old Extranet Security Editor with Sitecore XM/XP, it's difficult to design user permissions
A Marketplace app can be built for user/role-based access management
A real-world example of its use
Practical Web Security for Modern Headless Sitecore: Lessons from the Field by Piers Matthews
With SitecoreAI being a SaaS product, we have less focus on Infrastructure
This introduces complications, as developers may not be concerned about Security
We may have introduced vulnerabilities in our solutions that may only be discovered during a Pen-test
Or, we may have done some workarounds that result in a false-safe condition during a Pen-test
Piers had some suggestions that were very useful to have a secure SitecoreAI instance
Conclusion
AI is here to stay. The whole event was mostly about AI.
The way we work as developers/marketers is going to be heavily influenced by AI
It's still finding its way. Some of the use cases for AI are new and may not last.
But, make no mistake, some use cases of AI are already concrete and being used by several teams.
Marketplace Apps are going to be the new tool for Sitecore enthusiasts
We will see several Marketplace apps from the Community members in the future