You’re already feeling it.

Each vendor’s site is a live demonstration of its platform’s capabilities. Optimizely leans into experimentation-led personalization; Adobe’s Experience Platform is orchestrated with precision; Salesforce blends CRM depth with conversational interfaces; Sitecore showcases agentic flows that guide content and conversion. These aren’t static pages. They’re dynamic systems that anticipate your needs, route you cleanly to the next step, and prove both the tech and the operating model behind it. The experience is the evidence.

Agents are now the center of the DXP. Not a feature. Not an add‑on. The center. That’s the big shift in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2025: the story has moved from isolated tech stacks to agentic orchestration that pursues outcomes.

This matters now because agents turn features into empowering systems

This isn’t about vendors shipping more modules. It’s about heat‑seeking agents that weave data, content, decisioning, and delivery into fluid, goal‑oriented experiences — and about your ability to wield them. In our evaluation, the differentiator isn’t who checks the most boxes; it’s who turns those boxes into a self‑optimizing system.

And no, the endgame isn’t pure automation. AI computing empowers people first — by reducing their cognitive load, compressing their cycle times, and freeing their teams to tackle higher‑order work. Expect productivity and experience gains where your agents augment, not replace, your human judgment.

We’re already in Act II

Vendors began building agent patterns in 2022, then spent the next three years hardening them: grounding with enterprise knowledge, adding guardrails, and embedding them into platforms you can actually run. That’s why you can feel agentic orchestration in live marketing, sales, and support today — not just in demos.

What the 2025 DXP Forrester Wave evaluation actually says

We scored nine providers on current offering, strategy, and relative customer feedback. The labels — Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders — are signals of posture and pace in this agentic transition:

  • Leaders are backed by powerful investors and bold product teams. They’re building agentic ecosystems where AI agents will subsume many one‑off SaaS tasks. You’ll notice cadence, coherence, and compounding learning across their public funnels.
  • Strong Performers are gritty climbers. They’re bringing customers along, embedding agents into everyday workflows and investing in enablement so adoption (and value) sticks.
  • Contenders deserve your attention. Watch them closely. They’re making risky, disciplined pivots toward agentic orchestration, often in complex, regulated estates. Roadmaps are redirecting investment to agents, observability, and low‑risk migration paths.

You won’t win by building another stack

Your upside won’t come from engineering your own agent platform. Your upside comes from reengineering how work gets done — outcome by outcome, seam by seam. Think empowerment, not “digital labor.”

  • Name your outcomes and guardrails. Agents optimize what you articulate; your brand is the steward of those boundaries. So, start with employee‑facing scenarios to derisk while you learn.
  • Build your knowledge capacity. Proprietary knowledge is your edge. Capture it, link it, and put it to work in models, RAG pipelines, and agents.
  • Ground your agents. Decide where your agents live and where your knowledge lives — and invest in the infrastructure (databases, vectors, graphs) that keeps your outputs real.
  • Adopt a village model. Treat adoption as a team sport — benefits, funding, responsibilities, and enablement shared across IT, domain experts, and operations.

Feel it live: DXP vendors are their own “customer zero”

Don’t just take anyone’s word for it. Experience their agentic platforms in the wild: how they market, sell, and support you is the truest demo of their technology and operating model. We favored vendors that show their agent mastery publicly and deploy forward‑deployed engineers to help you adopt in phases.

What you should do next

If your digital experience platform is still a collection of parts, don’t just add more features. Shift the center. Let agents orchestrate the seams — and free your teams to reengineer how work gets done.

Start with mindset. Track with telemetry. Map the workflows. Govern the change.

If you need help, let’s talk. Schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me. I offer a sharper lens for selecting and enabling transformation teams — aligning execution with your strategy for lasting improvement through tech, governance, and culture.

Forrester clients can read The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2025 to compare vendors and see how agentic orchestration is reshaping the market.

Forrester clients can also look forward to my upcoming report on how the agentic DXP changes the game to understand the mindset, skill set, and operating model shifts required to thrive in this new era.