May 2025: Sitecore's AI story was written by everyone except Sitecore

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May 2025: Sitecore's AI story was written by everyone except Sitecore

Every source in this May 2025 Sitecore roundup is somebody's personal blog. Fourteen items, fourteen practitioners, and nothing from Sitecore's own newsroom made it into the harvest. That is the month: a vendor shipping AI faster than it documents it, and a community filling the gap at its own expense.

One caveat before the list. We reached May 2025 through feed archives rather than live crawling, so the coverage is thinner than a current month and skewed toward blogs that keep their archive online. Read it as a solid sample, not a census.

Stream shipped, and three people had to reverse-engineer it

Sitecore Stream is the AI layer, and in May three unrelated developers each published the manual Sitecore had not.

Behind the Scenes of Sitecore Stream: Decompiling DLLs to Discover API Calls — Chirag Goel, Coders Lifeline The most revealing item of the month, for reasons its author did not intend. Goel wanted to know how Stream actually talks to its backend, found the documentation covered the surface only, and so pulled Sitecore.AiClient.dll apart with dnSpy and dotPeek, then replayed the calls he found in Postman. He adds a warning of his own that decompiling proprietary code is a licensing question, which is the correct instinct. If this is how a paying customer has to learn the request path of a commercial product, the product has a documentation problem.

Sitecore Stream - Configure AI capabilities into Sitecore XP using Stream Platform DxP package — Daivagna Nanavati The on-premises angle: getting Stream's brand-aware generation working against XP rather than a SaaS product, where the XP instance calls out to the hosted Stream service. Nanavati puts the prerequisites first, which matters because they are the part that kills the project: a Stream licence, and a Sitecore version he gives as 10.2 or above. Both are his numbers from his own setup, so confirm them with Sitecore before you scope anything on them.

Sitecore Stream on XM and XP — Balaji Kandasamy, Bala Blog The install path, portal to package to menu entry, written from a run through the free tier. He also names the unblocking step nobody documents: if Stream is not visible in your cloud portal, that is an entitlement question for your partner manager, not a bug. Tier details come from his account rather than a price list, so treat them as a starting point with Sitecore.

Three independent write-ups of one product in thirty-one days is not a healthy community signal. It is three people paying, separately, for the same missing chapter.

The Sitecore MCP server is one person's project

Sitecore MCP Server: Try It by Yourself!, Sitecore MCP Server: Help wanted! and MCP Servers and Cursor: Troubleshooting the Problems — exdst.com Three of our fourteen items come from one site, which is worth stating plainly. None of the three pages carries a byline; exdst.com is Anton Tishchenko's blog, the posts speak in the first person about the repository published under his own account, and the npm package is @antonytm/mcp-sitecore-server. We credit him on that basis and note that the harvest found no author on the page. He is also writing about software he builds, so read the enthusiasm with that in mind.

The setup post is genuinely useful: a JSON config block, GraphQL plus the Item Service as the transport, and a claim that anything from Sitecore 9.1 upward will work, which is his figure from his own compatibility statistics rather than a Sitecore statement. The troubleshooting post is better still, because it shows the real failure: a Cursor log that reports Connection closed and nothing else, exactly what an MCP server looks like when it dies before it can complain.

The "help wanted" post is the one that should give a technical lead pause. Its argument is that MCP is becoming infrastructure, "It will be like REST or GraphQL" in his words, and the call to action is for volunteers, because the roadmap he lays out is far longer than the list of what is finished. If your 2025 plan involved pointing an agent at Sitecore, in May the only credible way to do it was an unpaid side project asking for help.

What SUGCON 2025 actually left behind

SUGCON 2025 - part two with XM Cloud and SUGCON 2025 - the part with XM Cloud Content — Gert Gullentops Gullentops works at EPAM Belgium, a Sitecore implementation partner, so he has a commercial stake in the platform he is reporting on. His conference notes are still the clearest account of what was announced. Three things carry forward: the JSS SDK and starter kits were cut down and split from the XP line, arriving under the Content SDK name; a marketplace for extending Sitecore products was presented, which finally gives editing-UI extensions a home now that custom code on XM Cloud is discouraged; and XM Cloud Content was shown as a new CMS built on what Content Hub ONE taught them, described in the session material he quotes as "an evolution of Content Hub ONE, Sitecore's fully managed headless CMS".

Gullentops adds, flatly, that Content Hub ONE is dead. That is his read of a roadmap session, not a lifecycle statement from Sitecore, and anyone with a Content Hub ONE build in production should get it in writing from their account team rather than from a blog. It is also the single most consequential sentence anybody published about Sitecore in May.

The unglamorous half

5 Quick Tips for a More Secure Sitecore Environment — thebitsthatbyte.com; the page carries no usable byline, and the harvest captured a template placeholder where the author's name should be A WAF in front of everything, the Content Management role never public-facing, static analysis in the pipeline, subscribe to the security bulletins, apply the hardening guide. All of it is in Sitecore's own documentation and almost none of it is in the average delivery checklist.

Securing APIs with Azure APIM Policies — Code N Learn; credited only to the site handle "codeandlearnspot", with no person named Policy-level CORS, rate limiting per IP, response-header stripping and error handling at the gateway. Useful for any estate that puts APIM in front of a headless Sitecore endpoint.

Sync Data From Sitecore To Dynamics — Dean, at deanobrien.uk; the byline is a first name only. He works at Northumbria University The Data Exchange Framework route into Dynamics 365, with the install order that matters (DEF first, connector second) and the version pairing he used, DEF 8.0.0.0 against XP 10.3. Check the compatibility table on the Sitecore developer portal before you commit to those numbers.

Sitecore XM Cloud - Running local XM Cloud in Docker — Koen Heye, Koen Heye Blog Written after a proof of concept, which is why it opens with iisreset /stop rather than with architecture. That is the failure everyone hits and nobody writes down.

Building a Headless Integration Between Sitecore and Azure Functions — Nidhi Paneri Serverless logic alongside the Layout Service, in .NET. Well worn outside Sitecore, under- documented inside it.

Accelerating Content Ops with AI: Automating Content Authoring & Delivery with Anthropic Computer Use — Subramanian Ramanathan The most speculative item and the most interesting. Rather than call an API, he runs Anthropic's computer-use demo in a Docker container and lets it drive the Sitecore UI the way an author would: paste from a document, map fields, publish to preview, check the rendering, submit for indexing. That is a workaround for a CMS whose automation surface is smaller than its interface, and the fact that it works at all is a comment on both.

What the month cost

Sitecore shipped an AI product, renamed its JavaScript SDK, previewed a replacement CMS and opened a marketplace, and the operational record of all four is scattered across Blogspot, WordPress and a handful of personal domains. Every fact above needs a second check against Sitecore before you act on it, because none of it came from Sitecore.

Goel's post is the one to sit with. If the best available description of how a commercial AI product talks to its backend is a decompiler session someone published for free, that is not a thriving ecosystem. It is a support burden the vendor moved quietly onto its customers, and the invoice arrives later, in the sprint where nobody can explain why Stream stopped responding.

Sources

sitecore · azure · how-to · xm-cloud · ai · sitecore-send · sitecore-headless · sitecore-xp