Day 2 in London had everything I love: a good walk, great rooms, sharp conversations… and a little bit of storybook serendipity.
There’s something powerful about moving between rooms in the same city on the same day. Different formats. Different tribes. Different vantage points on where digital is heading. And yet, the threads connect.
From intimate roundtables to partner ecosystems to peer conversations over pizza and pub crawls, the contrast sharpened something for me.
Yes, the future is agentic. The magic is still human.
A morning with UK digital strategy leaders
Group photo from the morning with UK digital leaders
I woke up much fresher after a real night of sleep and took a morning walk to my first stop: an intimate gathering of customers at a Digital Leaders UK roundtable in a shared workspace that had a full-on Instagram vibe. The route included those little London alleyway shortcuts that feel like you’re walking through a movie set.
The room was small, but the conversations were big — customers from JPMorgan Chase, Cytiva, British Standards Institution, universities, and non-profits. Different missions, similar digital realities. I shared my talk on Thought Leadership and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), and it was fun delivering it in a tight roundtable setting after doing it on a big stage in January at the James Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In music terms, this was the club show after the concert hall — and honestly, I loved it.
My talk includes a lot on earnfluencing — the portmanteau I coined blending earned media and influencing — and how the roots of it go all the way back to my time as an in-house beat writer for the New Jersey Nets in 2006–07. I’m a big believer in serendipity in content, life, and career… and London decided to prove the point.
As if straight out of A Christmas Carol, I quite literally walked past a ghost of my own Christmas Past: the CEO of the Nets from my time there walked right by me on a Mayfair street. I didn’t even have enough time to register and say hello. Nearly twenty years, completely different lives and chapters… and we cross paths as pedestrian strangers in London.
Optimizely Partner Connect: leaning into the agentic shift
Hanging out at the Optimizely partners event in London. Left to right: Matthew McQueeny alongside the team from Altudo with Janaka Fernando, Harpreet Bushell and Una Verhoeven
From there, I headed to Shoreditch for Optimizely Partner Connect and caught up with familiar faces from that ecosystem.
There’s something fascinating about bouncing between communities. You see some of the same people, a whole new set of others, and you get a clearer picture of how the industry is evolving across tribes.
Optimizely is leaning in hard on Opal and agentic tech, and it’s giving me the sense there’s no Innovator’s Dilemma handcuffing them. They seem genuinely prepared for their agentic system to disrupt the traditional CMS gravity. In the DXP AI race, that willingness feels like a real differentiator.
Peter Yeung, CIO at Optimizely, presenting at their partner event in London
Optimizely CMS 13 is slated to launch end of March. There was excitement from the company and partners on the feature updates, particularly how immersed Opal will become within the CMS. Also, Optimizely Graph will be more marketer friendly for driving search experience, at feature parity with the current Search and Navigation product.
With how much AI has taken over all conversations, it is critical to remember how fundamental search is to customer experience within DXPs past, present, and future.
CMS Experts Group London: peer conversations that matter
Later in the afternoon, I joined the CMS Experts Group London session, hosted at the headquarter of MSQ DX in Covent Garden. The vibe felt like stepping onto the set of a Netflix show about a modern agency: layout, décor, energy, the whole thing… capped by a built-in 5pm happy hour.
One of my favourite parts of this community is getting dropped into all these contexts — vendor offices, agencies, partners — across different cities and cultures. Digital is global, but the way teams work is still deeply local.
The session itself was crisp and conversational: autocreation and workflows, accessibility, the future of content operations, GEO and AEO, and of course AI. Then we rolled straight into MSQ’s Thursday happy hour ritual and added our own fuel: Pizza Pilgrims.
As a New York City guy who knows a thing or two about pizza, I was pleasantly surprised. London did its thing.
One final thing connecting the two afternoon events: MSQ DX won Optimizely’s Customer Choice Partner of the Year.
London lessons and late-night perspective
Quick London travel lesson: Uber is not always the move. In central London, between congestion charges, construction, and traffic patterns, it can take as long to go two miles in a car as it does to walk it. Locals told me next time to trust the black cabs. They can use bus lanes, which is basically like having an offensive line clearing the way.
A few of us closed out the night with our own improvised pub crawl — rooftops, Chinatown, basement wine bars, conversations on cobblestone — the kind of night that reminds you conferences aren’t just about content.
They’re about connection.
Day 2 takeaway: the future is agentic, but the magic is still human.