Netcel’s OMVPs Take on the challenge of the Optimizely Opal Hackathon
What happens when five Netcel OMVPs bring AI, creativity, and a dash of competitive spirit together? At the Opal Hackathon 2025, our team rolled up their sleeves and pioneered two new Opal-powered tools designed to deliver real value for digital marketing teams.
What is the Optimizely Opal Hackathon?
The Opal Hackathon is Optimizely’s exclusive innovation challenge for OMVPs (Optimizely Most Valuable Professionals) and their teams. It’s a fast-paced event where some of the brightest minds in the Optimizely community come together to push the boundaries of AI and solve real-world digital challenges.
What is Opal?
Opal is Optimizely’s AI-powered co-pilot, a smart, brand-aware assistant built directly into the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP). It helps marketers automate repetitive tasks, surface insights, and personalise content - all through the simplicity of natural language.
Our mission:
Our goal was clear: Solve marketing editors’ problems through Opal AI, to create solutions that go beyond clever code to deliver practical value empowering marketing teams with smarter workflows, improved user experiences, and faster problem-solving.
Our Hackathon creations:
Integrated Event Operations: Optimizely Opal Event Management
Opal Event Management transforms fragmented event workflows into a seamless, AI-powered process. By integrating with Eventbrite, CMS, and CMP, teams can now plan, publish, and manage events through simple conversation.
The result: fewer errors, faster execution, consistent messaging across channels, and scalable event operations - all from one central orchestrator.
With this tool, you can:
- Ask Opal to “Show upcoming events” or “Create a new event in Eventbrite and sync it to CMS”
- Have Opal fetch events, attach them to campaigns, and publish them directly into CMS - without ever leaving the chat
Optimizely Opal Robots Management
Opal Robots Management simplifies SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) by enabling teams to manage robots.txt and llms.txt files using everyday language. Powered by the Stott Robots Handler Add-On, it centralises control, automates updates, and ensures compliance - removing technical barriers and streamlining governance.
The result: Rapid, nimble robots file management.
With this tool, you can:
- Manage robots.txt files by simply saying “Update robots.txt to block bots from test site”
- Centralise control of SEO-critical settings across multiple sites
- Simplify compliance with robust read/write permissions
- Eliminate the manual hassle of maintaining these critical configuration files
Why these tools matter
No more tab-juggling, fewer manual errors, and instant results - whether you’re managing global events or ensuring search and generative engine compliance.
- Events Management unifies event workflows from chat to CMS
- Robots Management delivers a governance-safe, AI-powered way to control SEO behaviour directly from Opal
Skills supercharged, knowledge gained
Through the hackathon, our OMVPs strengthened their expertise in:
- Wrapping APIs into intuitive Opal tools
- Building advanced chat agents and orchestrated workflows
- Leveraging SDKs in JavaScript, Python, and .NET
What’s next?
This is just the beginning. Expect smarter AI workflows, deeper integrations, and maybe even a live demo at Opticon later this year.
At Netcel, we believe the future of digital experiences is integrated, conversational, and AI-powered - and we’re proud to be building it, one hack at a time.
Meet us at Opticon
Want to see these tools in action? Come and meet our OMVPs at Opticon 2025. Whether you’d like to ask questions, explore the detail behind our hackathon entries, or even book a demo of the new solutions, our team would love to connect with you.