Midwest AEM User Group Recap: Unlocking and Supercharging AEM's Potential with AI: Insights and Innovations

[raf-winterpacht]

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We had a great session at our Chicago office as we hosted the AEM Midwest Chapter's 9th meeting in the community! Held last Thursday, 9/18, we enjoyed deep-dish pizza (a real Chicago treat!) and beverages and had a great discussion with other partners on a topic that everyone's talking about: AI. 

Although I was the main speaker that brought the topics, there were plenty of questions from our attendees including Eric from Huge, Jake from Bounteous, and Celinah from Perficient. That made the discussion both collaborative and informative, which is exactly what we're trying to achieve with these meetings.

👉A couple of Highlights from what we discussed:

• Everyone is eager to explore the possibilities of using Agentic AI, particularly with Sites Optimizer and LLM Optimizer
• Everyone has a wish-list of items they'd like to see incorporated into practical use of AI Assistants in Cloud Manager
• Generative AI is a super-cool feature, and seeing it incorporated more and more into the user interface has everyone excited
• After our presentation, we headed up to get spectacular views of the city from the rooftop terrace at Chicago's Civic Opera Building

💡 Favorite Moments:

• Great discussions with other practitioners on real-world use of AI and with AEM
• Multiple conversations about using AI for other use cases, like vibe coding, development, and site migrations

📚 Resources to catch you up:

Slide Deck at https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/aem-ug-presentation-midwest-chapter-sep-2025-aem-and-ai-pptx/28...

Video recording:

Be sure to join your local chapters and RSVP for future events! See https://aem-augs.adobe.com/ to explore the chapters and connect with others. Find ours at https://aem-augs.adobe.com/aemug-midwest-chapter/, and know that we are already planning for our next meeting, and hope to see you at there!

[kautuk_sahni]

Thanks for sharing the recap, @raf-winterpacht ! Looks like it was a fantastic session—AI in AEM is clearly sparking a lot of curiosity and practical ideas. 

Question: You mentioned AI Assistants in Cloud Manager being on the community’s wish-list. If Adobe had to prioritize, do you think it’s more critical for AI to focus first on developer workflows (deployments, pipelines, etc.) or on authoring/admin tasks (content validation, insights, etc.)? Curious where you see the bigger near-term win.

[raf-winterpacht]

Thanks @kautuk_sahni! I would expect that the site and content optimization for authors is much more critical, as there are many more users there. I do see development flows coming up more and more where AI can assist.