How We Mastered XP to XM Cloud Migrations Through AI Agent Orchestration, Not AI Tool Slop

When the industry started hyping so called “AI powered migrations,” we took a step back. While every sales person salivated all over themselves, every Sitecore engineer knew it was all smoke and mirrors.

At Nishtech, we have spent decades untangling complex Sitecore implementations. We have seen so many botched, slow, sloppy implementations that even seasoned veterans struggled with untangling the mess. Can you trust AI with the hardest problem you have?

We know that migrating from XP to XM Cloud is not something that can be solved with a shiny model or a magic script. There's no silver bullet.

You also cannot simply fix complexity by adding automation. You fix it through orchestration, the intelligent coordination of people, tools, and AI working together. Human Intelligence at the right checkpoints.

The Problem With AI Wrapped Migrations

Many “AI migration accelerators” look impressive in a demo, but behind the scenes they produce what we call AI slop. The code looks correct on the surface but is architecturally broken. Templates are flattened, dependencies are ignored, and naming conventions are lost. What makes Sitecore great with re-use and scalability goes right out the window.

The result is predictable. You've used ChatGPT before, we know a predictable ChatGPT answer almost immediately. It just feels slightly off, has the wrong tones, misses the mark just slightly. So if it hasn't mastered human prose and tone yet, you think your Sitecore implementation is less complex?

There's still an opportunity here for AI, lets not ignore that. There's hype around these tools that are claiming massive efficiencies. Your project might appear cheaper or faster in the beginning, but six months later every developer who opens the code says the same thing:

“I need to rewrite this.” ~ Every Developer Ever.

That is not transformation. That is technical debt with a fresh coat of paint.

We do not automate chaos. We orchestrate success.

Breaking Big Problems Into Orchestrated, Solvable Pieces

When you look at an XP to XM Cloud migration as one giant effort, it feels impossible. Hundreds of templates, renderings, data sources, rendering details, workflows, and customizations.

AI isn't good at solving large problems. It's good at solving small, spoon fed, highly parameterized, highly verified little problems.... and lots of them. It doesn't tire, it doesn't sleep. It does need to be planned, babysat and orchestrated.

The Nishtech approach to using AI is rooted in orchestration, not automation for its own sake. We divide the migration into a set of intelligent, Sitecore Architect prompted agent-driven tasks, each with a clear purpose, measurable accountability, and human oversight. Lots and lots of human oversight, reporting, and validation.

• Template and Field Mapping: Identify and align every template, layout, item, datasource, component rendering, field, etc across your Sitecore XP environment to prepare for transformation. Everything in Sitecore is an item that can be serialized and then extracted and then thrown into the next step of our AI workflow.
• Data Serialization and Validation: Convert and normalize content into clean, portable models that stay compatible with Sitecore’s native serialization standards. This is where we breakup tasks for our agents into content and code tracks. Content needs to go through its own agentic workflow to be mapped and migrated, code is going to go through its own transformative workflow to go from webforms or MVC to NextJS.
• Rendering Extraction: Separate presentation components, rebuild them into composable units, and prepare them for use in NextJS and XM Cloud.
• Content Transformation and Relinking: Refine and relink content, ensuring every datasource, asset, and relationship remains intact after import.
• Re-assembly: Now orchestrate it all coming back together, transformed content and modern NextJS code, deployed and released to your new XM Cloud environment.

Each task operates as an independent agent within our orchestration engine. AI handles the repetition, grunt work, transforming, component refactoring, analysis. Humans handle the reasoning, architecture, and quality decisions. Human and AI checkpoints sprinkled in as we go for error checking, edge cases, and code reviews. We've introduced agentic code reviews, but everything needs to be verified.

The result is a process that is cleaner, faster, and entirely predictable from beginning to end.

Agent Orchestration: AI in the Right Places

We did not remove AI. We redefined its role.

Our orchestration model gives AI the repetitive work such as transforms, field audits, and dependency checks. Humans handle the creative and intuitive work that involves making judgment calls, interpreting business logic, and ensuring architectural integrity.

Our internal MCP, or Model Context Protocol servers, provide the connection between automation and architecture. They enforce guardrails, sequence agent tasks, and preserve structure.

Think of MCP as an orchestration control tower. Every agent reports in, every step is validated, and every operation is accountable. There are no black boxes and no surprises.

MCPs are the microservices that sit on top of or along side Sitecore to allow our AI Agents to communicate.

Nishtech Built Our Own MCP Server for Sitecore

We built our own MCP server on top of Sitecore XP and Sitecore XMC. It's only a matter of time before Sitecore exposes their own, it's inevitable. For now, our MCP connects directly to your environment to be able to interact with all the itemized content allowing importing and exporting. Then the AI sits in between that does not just read templates. It interprets them. It maps layouts, renderings, and datasources, creating a complete architectural fingerprint of your Sitecore instance. This is the special sauce, lots and lots and lots of prompt engineering and output guidance based on how content and code needs to be architected based on Sitecore best practices. No LLM or ML will get that right on its own without the Human Intelligence.

The Special Sauce is to map Human Intelligence to the right workflow checkpoints and not let the AI run wild.

Our prompt engineering is guided by more than twenty years of Sitecore experience and informed by hundreds of audits we have completed across enterprise implementations. Our MCP understands what good architecture looks like because we have seen it in production, across industries, at scale.

We use AI to accelerate understanding, not to replace it.

Our MCP ensures every migration aligns with proven Sitecore architecture rather than generated code. Each control point acts as a checkpoint before promotion or deployment, preventing AI slop before it can reach production. That is the difference between AI assisted and AI orchestrated. That's the difference between tools that promise seventy percent faster and instead focus on quality output.

Do Not Fall for the Lower Cost Trap

It can be tempting to select the vendor that promises a faster migration for less money. But a cheaper migration that leaves you with unmaintainable code is not a victory. It is a liability. It's tech debt on day one.

You want your new XM Cloud environment to feel like a fresh start. It should feel like the first day of school, with clean notebooks, organized folders, and a system that is ready to grow.

That is what orchestration delivers. It produces a platform that is not only migrated but also renewed. When you invest in orchestration, you are not paying for hours. You are investing in longevity and quality. You are building a platform that your developers will enjoy maintaining rather than one they immediately want or need to rebuild.

Results That Prove It

By orchestrating instead of automating blindly, we have achieved measurable results:

• Eighty five percent higher success rate compared to AI first migration projects
• Seventy percent reduction in post launch defects
• Faster quality assurance cycles with consistent and reusable frameworks
• Lower long term cost of ownership due to maintainable codebases

Our clients see the difference. Our teams feel it. The developers we hand off to love it. Our projects sustain it.

The Future of Migration Is Orchestration

We do not create disposable AI scripts. We build orchestrated ecosystems that combine automation with architecture, speed with control, and innovation with accountability.

A migration should not simply move your content. It should elevate your platform. True success happens when you replace AI slop with agent orchestration guided by experience and human intelligence.