Progress Software Delivers Intelligent Digital Experiences with Sitefinity and Agentic RAG Technology
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Industries:
Technology/SoftwareChallenge
As AI-driven and zero-click search became more common, the Digital Marketing team at Progress noticed shifting traffic trends, with users increasingly finding answers before ever reaching the website. At the same time, expectations grew for more contextual responses to complex questions. While the Sitefinity-powered website provided a strong foundation, Progress sought to leverage its own agentic RAG capabilities to augment the experience with intelligent, intent-driven interactions.
Solution
- Integrated the Progress Agentic RAG solution into Sitefinity to deliver conversational, intent‑based answers while preserving navigation experiences
- Implemented a phased rollout to validate answer quality, guardrails and user journeys before scaling
- Aligned agentic RAG technology with Sitefinity governance to provide trusted, grounded answers and enterprise‑ready control across the digital experience
Result
- Drove 29% higher homepage engagement, doubled time on site to 27 minutes and increased conversion rates by 37%
- Revealed user intent through 7,000‑plus conversational queries, transforming search data into actionable content and journey insights
- Established a scalable foundation to expand agentic RAG across Sitefinity properties and support future generative CMS experiences
Full Story
Challenge
Progress serves a digitally savvy audience of developers, IT leaders and business decision makers who expect fast, precise answers to increasingly complex questions. While the Progress website already benefited from a robust, enterprise-grade digital experience built on its own Sitefinity product, changes in user behavior and industry trends signaled a new challenge.
Visitors were no longer navigating linearly through menus or browsing pages sequentially. Instead, they arrived with specific, contextual questions—often influenced by AI assistants and zero-click search experiences elsewhere. Traditional site search and navigation, while effective for structured discovery, were not designed to surface immediate, intent-driven answers at scale.
As Kate Pendarvis, Vice President of Creative and Digital Marketing, noted, “Throughout 2024, we started noticing changes in trends. Our website traffic was declining with the rise of AI-driven and zero-click search. We had to ask ourselves what was happening and what we could do to counteract it.”
At the same time, Progress recognized the risks of ceding customer engagement to external AI tools. When users found answers off-site, Progress lost not only traffic, but key insight into intent. As Pendarvis explained, “I wanted to bring the experience users are having with generative search into our website, but with the context of our website.” Any solution would need to keep users engaged on-site, be grounded in trusted content and operate within the governance standards expected of an enterprise SaaS provider.
“We weren’t looking to replace our digital experience,” said Megan Gouveia, Director of Digital Strategy. “Progress Sitefinity already gave us a strong foundation to innovate on top of.”
Traditional site search is limited. The Progress Agentic RAG solution feels like the next generation because it’s intent-driven, measurable and flexible enough to evolve as models and user behavior change.
Joe Prather
Manager of Digital Strategy at Progress
Solution
The concern proved timely. As Pendarvis began socializing the concept internally, including mock-ups of a generative search experience layered directly onto the Progress website, Progress had just completed its acquisition of Nuclia, now known as the Progress Agentic RAG solution. Now, with a clear vision in place, a cross-functional team led by Pendarvis was assembled to evaluate the user journey and deploy the new intelligent digital experience successfully.
The solution was not positioned as a standalone chatbot or a replacement for browsing, but to deliver conversational, follow-up driven answers while preserving natural navigation and discovery within Sitefinity CMS.
Implementation followed a phased rollout using Sitefinity personalization capabilities, beginning with a small percentage of users and expanding only after validating answer quality and user behavior.
Close alignment across the team meant the focus stayed on refining answers, building context and applying guardrails to promote relevance and trust. Ultimately, combining Sitefinity CMS with the Progress Agentic RAG solution enabled the company to move with speed, confidence and governance, transforming a bold idea into a scalable, repeatable solution.
Result
By combining the Progress Agentic RAG solution with Sitefinity CMS, Progress delivered immediate, measurable improvements across engagement and conversion. Homepage engagement increased 29%, while users who interacted with the agentic RAG technology spent more than twice as long on the site, averaging up to 27 minutes per session.
Conversion performance also improved significantly, with a 37% higher conversion rate compared to traditional site search. These results demonstrate clear ROI from meeting users with faster, intent-driven answers directly on the website. Beyond performance metrics, Progress gained unprecedented insight into how users actually search and learn. More than 7,000 conversational queries revealed real, high-intent questions that traditional keyword search had never exposed.
As Joe Prather, Manager of Digital Strategy, explained, “Traditional site search is more keyword based. With this, we’re finding user intent. We can see what the user is asking and what they’re trying to do on our website, and that, to a digital strategist, is everything.”
With a strong foundation established, Progress is focused on expanding agentic RAG across additional digital experiences, including documentation and community properties, while continuing to evolve how AI and content work together. “AI is here to stay, and we’re embracing that as a company. We’re looking for new ways to deliver that experience to our users,” said Pendarvis. By combining agentic RAG technology with the Sitefinity CMS and laying the groundwork for generative CMS capabilities, Progress is building a digital experience designed not only to adapt to changing search behavior, but to lead it.
AI is here to stay and we’re embracing that as a company. Combining the Progress Agentic RAG solution with the Progress Sitefinity CMS gives us a powerful foundation today and as generative CMS capabilities emerge, it opens an entirely new way to create and personalize digital experiences for our users.
Kate Pendarvis
VP of Creative and Digital Marketing at Progress