Liferay Co-Founder and CMO Bryan Cheung’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on Digital Transformation

What were the pivotal inflection points in your marketing career that shaped your leadership philosophy, especially your approach to prioritization, experimentation, and resource allocation?

One pivotal inflection point was when Liferay evolved from being viewed as a portal with CMS to a full Digital Experience Platform about eight years ago. That shift required a new marketing strategy and a clearer way to explain our value to line-of-business buyers, including marketers, not just technical stakeholders.

More recently, we’ve rebalanced our marketing mix to reflect how buyer behavior has shifted post-COVID. We’ve put more emphasis on digital as a primary growth lever, including welcoming Sebastien Edgar as our Global VP of Digital Marketing to help accelerate that strategy. He has been instrumental in evolving how we show up online, including how we structure content to surface in answer engines.

Liferay has been in business for over twenty years. How has the digital experience market changed in that time?

The market has evolved from CMS and portals to DXPs, especially over the last eight years. The goal expanded from managing and publishing content to enabling highly personalized and connected customer experiences across multiple digital or in-person touchpoints. DXPs have been solving marketer use cases such as brand governance and digital marketing, but we’re also being challenged to improve experiences for existing customers.

Because our customers keep pushing the limits of what they want to accomplish with a DXP, Liferay has invested in AI and low-code capabilities that make it easier for companies to quickly create and update digital experiences to meet their evolving needs.

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Many CMOs are grappling with fragmented journeys. Prospects have a great experience on the marketing site, but then fall into a ‘digital black hole’ once they become a customer. How is Liferay helping organizations bridge the gap between initial acquisition and long-term retention?

Liferay DXP is flexible enough to build both pre-purchase experiences, such as campaign sites, and post-purchase experiences, such as customer portals. That gives marketers two big advantages:

First, the customer can keep the same identity from the first marketing touch to the 100th support ticket, so data stays connected. Second, teams can deliver a consistent brand experience across the lifecycle, so the public site and the customer portal do not feel disconnected.

For global enterprises operating in regions with strict data residency laws, like the EU, the ‘SaaS-only’ model can create significant hurdles. How does Liferay’s flexibility in deployment models empower CMOs to own their digital strategy without compromising on compliance?

Many vendors take a “cloud-first” approach that ends up feeling SaaS-only. Liferay is “choice-first,” with SaaS, PaaS, public cloud, and private cloud deployment options that deliver the same core functionality. For regions like the EU, that flexibility helps organizations meet data residency requirements by keeping data within specific borders, which can be a real legal and competitive advantage. In regulated industries, it also matters that customers can control their upgrade cycles instead of being forced into SaaS updates that could introduce compliance risk. To support that level of governance, Liferay also invests heavily in security and responsible AI practices. Liferay has earned ISO/IEC 42001 certification, the international standard for AI management systems, which provides a framework for developing, deploying, and managing AI responsibly.

We’re entering a ‘Privacy-First’ era where third-party cookies are disappearing. This puts a premium on first-party data. How does Liferay DXP help brands capture and utilize first-party data across different touchpoints while safeguarding customer data and ensuring compliance?

We believe organizations need to adopt a value-exchange approach. The most ethical and effective way to earn first-party data is to give customers real utility, for example, through a customer portal that saves them time and gives them control over their account. From there, Liferay’s analytics capabilities focus on capturing behavioral intent within a secure environment, not invasive cross-site tracking, so brands can personalize responsibly while protecting customer data and staying compliant. We’re investing further into this area, with plans to launch a light customer data platform in Q3. Coupled with our deployment flexibility and responsible AI certification, companies can rest assured that their customer data is secure and private.

Search is changing. With the rise of AI-powered search engines, we’re moving from SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). How is Liferay preparing brands to be ‘discoverable’ not just by Google, but by LLMs and AI agents?

We’re updating our product in a few different ways to more easily supply content to answer engines.

First, LLMs and AI agents are more inclined to include content in their responses when that content is structured, not just long-form text. Liferay’s structured content capabilities help teams create consistent, reusable content that not only works for traditional search but is optimized for answer engines to use as source data.

Second, we created Liferay AI Hub, which makes it easy to define custom workflows that leverage AI agents. So a marketing team could use AI to help with keyword analysis, AEO/GEO optimization, and content generation, all in a way that’s tailored to their specific requirements. As their needs change, they could update the AI workflows accordingly. With the landscape evolving so quickly, nobody yet knows 100% how to solve for answer engine discovery, so we felt that flexible approach would be really important to serve marketers both in the near term and long term.

Finally, when it comes to content generation, it’s important to ground your AI in your own content and data. This leads to more accurate and higher quality output. Liferay is designed to give organizations that kind of control.

Localization is a massive challenge for global brands. How does Liferay’s approach to multi-site management and AI-powered translation help marketing leaders maintain SEO authority across dozens of different regions without doubling their headcount?

A lot of our understanding of and support for multinational organizations comes from our own heritage. Due to open source, our business grew organically in Europe, LATAM, and Asia from our earliest days—for example, we created our first European subsidiary just two years after founding the company.

Based on our experience serving international organizations, we’ve built native capabilities that help teams not only to manage (and localize) content centrally, but also to create and manage multiple sites, often using a shared set of templates and a common design system, so teams can quickly create new local sites without having to rebuild everything region by region.

Liferay can also integrate with tools like Google and DeepL to support machine-assisted translation in content workflows while keeping human editors in the loop for final approval. Local teams can override global content for regional SEO and GEO needs without losing brand consistency.

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Looking ahead to the next 18 months, what is the one ‘under-the-radar’ challenge that enterprise marketing leaders aren’t talking about enough, and how should they be preparing their tech stack today?

First, I think it’s important that marketing leaders are able to tailor AI to their specific needs. Of course I’m biased because our product does that, but I already see the benefit of that tailorability even for my own marketing practice. Some of the initial AI-powered features MarTech providers have built are great, but they’re typically quite prescriptive, and our needs are going to get more complex.

Second, I think we’re underestimating how quickly we need to reshape our teams to be AI savvy. AI is a force multiplier for everything from product and content marketing to digital demand gen. Our teams and job descriptions are going to look very different.

Finally, in the same way that the Internet forced us all to rethink the in-person, physical experiences, I think marketing leaders will need to balance the growing prevalence of AI with undoubtedly human experiences. After all the product research is done, customers still want to do business with people they like and a brand that they trust. We have to create opportunities for customers to get to know the real humans in the organizations they’re evaluating—in fact, the more AI drives efficiency in those early, content-heavy discovery phases, the more buying decisions will be made on intangibles like culture, ethos, and brand commitment.

Thank you, Bryan Cheung’s,  for taking the time to share your insights with us.

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