In AI, speed is the promise, fragmentation is the problem: Sherazade Fetita, VP, Marketing, Liferay

Every technology leader is being pushed to move faster on AI. Few vendors will tell them that now might be the moment to pause. Sherazade Fetita, VP of Marketing at open source digital experience platform (DXP) vendor Liferay, did exactly that in an interview with us.

Fetita runs a global team of about 25 marketers and oversees go-to-market for a portfolio that has grown from two products to seven in a year. Her view is one CIOs will recognise: the technology is moving quickly, but the organisation around it is not.

India is a “core territory”
Liferay serves roughly 20 territories, and Fetita is clear about where India sits. “India is definitely what we call a core territory for us this year, meaning that we are really going full force with not only sales but with marketing investment as well,” she says. “We have lots of strong brands, customers that are established here, partners as well that support us.”

India is also where much of Liferay’s engineering sits, which she cites alongside the partner ecosystem as a reason for the commitment. She singled out one theme from a customer presentation at the event: partners who understand customer intent and can support it “regardless of the technology capabilities.”

On whether the new portfolio changes how India should be treated, she is measured. “I don’t see necessarily something different in the way that the Indian market would adopt it,” she says. “Some [markets] have different levels of maturities, but the new products and the new value proposition will bring value to all of the markets.”

AI Hub leads the conversation
Liferay’s new products include AI Hub, a low-code environment for building and managing AI agents, along with the Liferay Data Platform and a Content Marketing Platform. Asked which has the most pull, Fetita points to AI Hub, and says a local partner confirmed it. “AI Hub is the number one that is on everybody’s mouth,” she says. “I’m seeing this globally.”

She acknowledges it was the first of the new products out, so the ecosystem has had longer to absorb it. But she believes the explanation is simpler: “I think it’s really because everybody wants to go fast. Everybody needs to transform fast. There’s a lot of transformation that needs to be done in different parts of the company, and AI definitely helps to speed up the process.”

Time to market, and consistency
Pressed on what AI actually changes, Fetita gives a single answer. “For me, it’s really time to market,” she says. “The ability to launch faster, to be on the market faster, to keep up with the changing customer expectations faster. And to capture the customer intent when it’s there, and not lose that momentum.”

The old problem, she explains, was latency. A customer need might go unseen, or be seen but take too long to act on. “In the past, you wouldn’t have the insights that we have today. You wouldn’t have the capacity to move fast.”

She sees the benefit across functions: campaigns out of the door quicker for marketing, deals closed sooner for sales, and for customers, personalisation without fragmentation. “Where AI really supports a lot, not only with the time to market, is in getting that consistency across the customer journey,” she says. “From being a prospect to being a loyal customer, all of that experience is the same, and they don’t face fragmentation.”

Liferay’s India head, Manish Gupta, offers a concrete example of the speed claim: an insurance customer that once took months to launch a new product and now does it in weeks with Liferay and AI integrations.

The “best kept secret”: marketers
Liferay has historically sold to IT leaders and is best known for portals and websites. The new portfolio, which adds campaign, content and data tooling, is aimed at a different buyer: the CMO. Fetita says the reaction should not be read as Liferay chasing a brand-new audience.

“The theme of our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year was the best kept secret,” she says. “I use that for marketing, because Liferay for marketing feels like a new thing, but it’s actually not. We’ve been doing this for the past 20 years.”

Her logic is that marketing and communications teams were always the people behind public websites and customer portals, but Liferay’s IT-led positioning kept them out of view. “Who is behind the public websites? It’s the communication teams, marketing teams. We never really put that up front. Now we’re talking more about digital marketing: how do you build campaigns, how do you build all of that.”

The commercial logic is plain. Gupta notes that marketing holds large budgets in most organisations, and that the website was historically only a small slice of what Liferay could address. Fetita, who is candid that she is “biased, as a marketer,” sees potential in the shift.

She describes the early traction as encouraging. The marketing proposition launched in September and was presented at customer summits in Brazil, Vienna and Nashville. At the Nashville session, she says, “we had tons of customers coming to the team afterwards, asking questions. They were really happy with it and wanted to learn more.”

For a buyer outside marketing, her pitch is consolidation: “One vendor, one platform, that is going to serve multiple departments. You don’t need one platform for sales, one for post-sales, one for commerce and one for marketing.”

Fragmentation is the gap
Asked what market gap Liferay fills, Fetita does not mention a feature. “The biggest one is the fragmentation,” she says. “Companies, in order to serve the full customer journey, are going to have different solutions for it. A specific marketing tool for their campaigns, a specific CMS for their sites, and so on.”

She takes aim at rivals who have assembled suites through acquisition. Many competitors, she says, cover only one or two pieces of the picture, and those that cover more often got there by merger. She repeats a line from Liferay CEO Brian Chan, that they have “Frankenstein-ed” products together, and says integration work and bugs follow. “In our case, everything is homegrown. They are built from the start in a way to work together seamlessly.”

That claim has a counterpart in Gupta’s account of Liferay’s own history. He concedes that earlier integrations between Liferay and third-party campaign and data tools were loose, and that the new Data Platform exists partly to tighten them.

Fetita also credits open source as a 100% advantage, though she moves quickly to the two areas where she thinks the market has a larger gap.

Responsible AI and data sovereignty
The first is governance. “Everybody wants to use AI, and the two pieces we put focus on, which I still see as gaps in the market, are responsible AI and data sovereignty,” she says. She points to the AI-related certification Liferay holds as support for that stance.

She describes what she sees as the market’s central error. “The trap of the market is to just jump on AI and try to do whatever, tons of things with it, but not think about the implications of it.” The problems show up with heavy use. “From compliance, from hallucinations, from it starting to do things you didn’t ask it to do. You really have to govern it.”

For India, she links this directly to the sector mix. “We have a lot of financial services companies. This is super important because there are regulations that they need to comply with, and we’re here to support.”

This is the same argument Gupta makes about AI Hub, whose agents are designed to act only within the permissions of the user on whose behalf they operate, rather than roaming across enterprise data. The framing reflects wider CIO worry: a recent Thoughtworks survey found that 88% of Indian respondents agreed AI adoption is outpacing governance structures.

“Stop and breathe”

The most unexpected part of the interview is Fetita’s warning about her own profession. Marketing teams, she says, are feeling pressure to prove they need their headcount.

“Where AI touches marketing a lot is in justifying the size of marketing teams,” she says. “The shortcut is, come on, you can use AI to create faster and do more campaigns, so why do you need five people for that? That shortcut is very dangerous, because if you don’t really understand and use it properly and know what the limits are, it can lead to decisions that you can regret.”

She adds that the savings can be illusory. “When we use it to create content, sometimes when it starts hallucinating on you, you actually lose more time than what it saved you.”

Liferay, she admits, was not immune. When AI arrived, the instruction to marketing was to push harder on it. “We started doing it because we were under pressure,” she says. “I think you just have to at some point stop and breathe.” Her prediction is a collective rethink: “Maybe we went too fast. We have to go back a little bit and think more strategically about how to use it.” She recommends analysing results to see “what you can do better” before pushing further.

She is equally frank about the limits of Liferay’s own adoption. “Even us, honestly, there are still tons of things that we need to learn more and implement more.” With 25 marketers spread globally, “it’s not easy to coordinate and make sure that everybody is using it the same way.”

Asked to forecast the next six months, she declines. “I think we will not know what happens in six months. It’s going to be another crazy, crazy, crazy period of time.” Her advice is to focus on what already exists: “There are still lots of things to be done, and to be done properly and well, and not just start using AI.”

Data: Volume is not the problem
As AI generates ever more customer data, a CIO might expect Fetita to describe a deluge. She does not. “I don’t think the volume is really an issue, because you can have AI give you the volume, and then you can have another AI summarise it and shrink it down to the most important,” she says. “I wouldn’t complain if I have too much data.”

Her complaint is structural. “I would complain if I have it from different systems and I have to go into each one and try to sort it out. That’s where we are right now, and that’s where the nightmare is. It’s not the lack of data. It’s really having fragmented data.”

She calls this “the biggest challenge for us at Liferay as marketers, regardless of what we sell, and I think for the market in general.” It is a neat bookend to her earlier answer about the market gap, and it explains the thinking behind the Liferay Data Platform, which is designed to unify CRM, marketing automation and behavioural data into a single view that drives real-time personalisation inside the DXP.

For the next year, Fetita says, the roadmap is about depth, not breadth. “There won’t be new products in the next year. The product roadmap is clear. There won’t be new additions to it. We really want to invest deeper into the ones that we have.”

That matches the message from India. Gupta has said Liferay will not build more tools next year but will enhance the five it created in the past 12 months, while aiming to double its India business in one to two years.

Speed needs a brake. The case for AI is faster launches and consistent journeys. The cost of rushing is hallucination, rework and decisions made to justify headcount cuts. Fragmentation is the real obstacle. Fetita’s complaint about data scattered across systems is one most CIOs will recognise, and more AI will not fix it by itself.

Governance and sovereignty are differentiators. In regulated sectors such as Indian financial services, how AI is controlled may matter more than what it can do.

As marketing becomes a bigger buyer of enterprise platforms, CIOs will probably find themselves refereeing between the CMO’s appetite for speed and the compliance demands of the business. Fetita’s advice, from the CMO’s side of the table, is a useful starting point: use AI, but be willing to stop and ask what it is actually delivering.