At the Sitecore City Tour, we had the opportunity to present alongside our customer, Dairy Australia, and share the story behind their project and journey to SitecoreAI.
Joined on stage by Craig Bromley, Head of Experience at Dairy Australia, our General Manager Jon Holcombe walked through how the organisation modernised its digital platform while simplifying operations and setting the foundation for future innovation.
While the project itself was a major milestone, the discussion focused on something broader: how organisations actually unlock value from modern digital platforms once the migration is complete.
The Starting Point: A Platform Ready for Change
Dairy Australia operates as the national research and development organisation for the dairy industry, with a mission to support farmers and strengthen the long-term sustainability and profitability of the sector.
At the time of the project, the organisation was operating three websites serving different audience groups, each with their own brand identity. Although they sat on the same Sitecore platform, they had been developed at different points in time with variations in functionality and content management processes.
At the same time, the underlying platform required modernisation. The goal was to consolidate these experiences into two clear platforms:
- A farmer website providing dairy farmers, service providers and stakeholders with resources and support.
- A community website designed for broader audiences including consumers, teachers, students, healthcare professionals and job seekers.
Importantly, Dairy Australia wanted to retain distinct brand identities while improving consistency, simplifying content management and future-proofing the technology.
They also had a real deadline.
The organisation needed to move to XM Cloud quickly, but without simply carrying existing structural issues into the next generation of the platform.
A Migration That Balanced Speed and Flexibility
For Switch, the challenge was clear: enable a rapid migration while avoiding a “lift and shift” that would replicate fragmentation.
Instead of migrating each site as-is, the project aligned Dairy Australia’s requirements with Switch’s accelerator, Recursion, and it’s component library, allowing the team to introduce a shared component system and design approach while accelerating the move to XM Cloud.
This approach delivered the benefits of standardisation without sacrificing flexibility across the two distinct digital experiences.
The Result: Streamlined Operations
The migration itself was smooth, but the biggest impact came from the operational improvements that followed.
Dairy Australia successfully:
- Consolidated multiple websites onto a unified platform
- Implemented a shared design system
- Simplified content management processes across teams
The results have been significant.
Content updates can now be delivered three times faster, reducing time-to-market for new information and resources. The platform also reduced reliance on development resources through more intuitive authoring tools, improved site performance and streamlined internal workflows.
Most importantly, the organisation now has a scalable and future-ready platform with lower ongoing maintenance overhead.
Migration Is Only the First Step
One of the key messages from the session was that migration alone does not deliver value.
Like many organisations adopting modern SaaS platforms, Dairy Australia had also invested in several capabilities within the Sitecore ecosystem, including:
- Sitecore Search
- Content Hub
- Built-in personalisation capabilities
The real question quickly became:
How do we ensure these capabilities actually deliver outcomes for the business?
To help answer this, Switch introduced a methodology called Squeeze, designed to help organisations cut through the complexity of modern composable platforms.
Rather than focusing purely on features, the framework looks at three key factors:
Feature Promise – What the platform says it can do.
Conditions – What must be in place for those features to work effectively.
Capability – Whether the organisation has the people, processes and operating model to use them.
For Dairy Australia, this helped the team prioritise the right capabilities, align internal stakeholders and focus on initiatives that would deliver meaningful impact.
Finding a Practical AI Use Case
With the foundations in place, the conversation naturally turned to AI.
But instead of starting with experimentation or hype, the team focused on identifying a real operational challenge.
One area stood out: event content.
Dairy Australia manages a large number of events. Event data is created in Salesforce and then pushed into SitecoreAI. While the data itself is functional, it still requires manual rewriting to create engaging, audience-ready event pages.
This process created a significant operational workload.
The team explored whether AI could help accelerate this process while maintaining quality.
Rather than simply asking AI to generate content, Switch are working on a a context-driven approach within SitecoreAI. Brand voice, audience personas and content pillars will be embedded into the system, allowing AI to generate structured drafts based on incoming event data.
The workflow is simple:
Event data flows from Salesforce into SitecoreAI → AI processes the information with contextual guidance → a draft event page is generated → a content author reviews, refines and publishes.
AI accelerates the process, but humans remain firmly in control of quality and brand integrity.
Key Lessons from the Project
Rapid migration is possible.
But acceleration must be paired with architectural discipline to avoid recreating old problems on new platforms which Recursion can solve.
SaaS investment must be operationalised.
Buying a platform does not create value on its own. Organisations need clear frameworks and operating models to turn features into outcomes.
AI works best when applied to real problems.
Rather than broad experimentation, the biggest gains often come from solving specific operational friction points. Build a meaningful use case, prove the ROI and scale.
Want to learn more about our squeeze methodology? Contact us and we’ll be happy to walk you through it.
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