Unlocking Innovations with Sandy Ono at OpenText World 2024

This is Textron tv. Hello everybody. We're back at OpenText World in Las Vegas and we're gonna be talking with Sandy here about, well, the show itself.

Sandy, welcome to Thanks for having me. Pleasure. This is kind of your baby.

At the end of the day, you're the one who kind of puts all this stuff together. Um, there's folks watching this who couldn't be here. Give them some of the highlights of, you know, what were the takeaways?

'cause a lot of these things are recorded and they're on a virtual platform somewhere so they can access them. But from your perspective, what are the key highlights? Well, um, uh, it is kind of a, I guess my baby at the end of the day, but it's our collective annual show that we put on Mm-Hmm.

Uh, so OpenText world, for those of you who ha who aren't here with us in person, um, is really our annual user conference. Um, and it's about our products, our innovations, and being able to showcase what is to come for our customers. So some of the key big takeaways is really we've been in the Aviator or our AI product now for about a year.

Um, so we're showing some real progress. Um, if you get to catch snippets of the show, we've been trying to get honed in on what is the real problems that real people are solving for, um, and what are the real benefits that, that, um, we are seeing. The other big themes coming outta the conference certainly is how OpenText can help our customers manage what is in their multi-cloud, um, kind of an integrated ecosystem, um, and be able to perform what they need to do across that MiFi cloud.

Um, and third thing is probably just how important security is. Um, security certainly is job number one and will continue to be, um, helping our customers through that front as well. For the folks who did attend, what do you want them to take home?

What do you want them to kinda understand about OpenText? Um, I think the key thing is that OpenText is really about helping our customers solve their mission critical issues. Um, most of the open deck software is used by, um, our knowledge workers day in, day out.

Um, and it's a piece of software that helps 'em get their job done. And now we're hoping to help them get their jobs down, uh, done in new ways, um, that are more, um, quicker, faster, um, and drive benefits. Um, we call the conference information reimagined, elevate that human potential, um, because it is about what we believe our software can do and to help, um, save people time at the end of the day.

There are a lot of brands that go into OpenText these days 'cause a lot of things came together. Microfocus being one of them. I'm, how does that all get organized from a marketing perspective in a way that makes it feel like there's some sort of cohesive engagement with OpenText per se, and 'cause it's a, there's a lot of different parts.

So how do you kind of message that? Well, I think at the heart of it is that we are all about information management. If you look at any parts of our business is about helping customers manage the large data sets.

Um, and when you think about that kind of is the congruent theme across all of our businesses, right? Large data sets, what do you do with them now? Can you apply AI to it?

Do you keep it secure? How do you keep it secure? Um, so that is the underlying current, um, that is the heart of our business and it's about information management.

Um, more recently we just updated our website, so hopefully we do think that it's actually easier for, for our customers to engage with all parts of our portfolio now. Um, we've moved to kind of a, a descriptive naming, uh, architecture, uh, so that people could just understand what the products do, um, as simple as that. And we are aware, continue to evolve how people could understand our products, um, from the user interface all the way to how we market it.

Um, and really honing in on the business problems that we help to solve. Yeah, I think everybody's talking about artificial intelligence and some people love it and other people are terrified. How do you kind of have that conversation with folks?

'cause you're at the forefront of this, and how do you kind of market AI per se? Um, we market AI not just at the what can it do? I think we're over that face.

Mm-Hmm. Um, I think that the art of the possible has been, you know, the, the forefront of maybe what 18 months ago. Um, but now it's about take, you know, what we can do to connect with the customers.

What business problems are they solving? What large data sets do they have and how do they need to walk down to the specific application of ai we call 'em agents. Um, so aviators are technology agents, the actual use case.

Um, and really it's about sitting down with customers and understanding how those things come together to actually, again, drive the ROI or solve a business problem that, um, they need. We showed a couple examples over the conference. Um, hopefully they've resonated with the audiences at home, but think about like a claims agent.

You know, they're going through their daily jobs, trying to process a claim. Now they can actually search across hurricane data and the historical claims and the customer information all within minutes using AI to be able to get their jobs done faster. So it really is about practical problems in which we're helping customers solve.

Um, and we hope that through this conference a year later, from the FA of ai, it is about showcasing our customers. Um, and the real use cases Is part of that mission to kind of maintain the human touch in some way in that whole conversation. And how do you actually convey that?

Well, you know, I, I go back to this thematic of elevate the human potential. And you're right, it is about the human at the center, right? Because machines can do what they need to do, but the decisions and the next steps are still taken by the human.

Um, you know, how we make sure of that is, is, is technology enables, uh, technology doesn't necessarily replace. Um, we're going to learn more about what technologies can do, um, and as the kind of autonomous decisions and how we kind of think through that. Um, we do think that the next step, uh, next step of AI is around AgTech frameworks.

And if you think about AgTech, uh, multi-step process, can you make decisions on behalf of each other? We don't learn into that. I don't think we're quite there yet.

I think we're still at the basic, uh, can, can this really help me get something I need to get done faster? And what we're learning is, is that, um, you know, we started the journey of just embedding AI in, um, applications. Now we're about solving for big ROI problems, um, that customers have.

For example, we had a retail customer and they were just solving for leakage, like billions of dollars, um, kind of loss of, you know, property that's kind of lost through, um, different things. So we solve for bigger problems like retail leakage, um, and being able to say, okay, now we can shore up these parts of the process. Um, that's where it becomes really practical.

Mm-Hmm. I think, um, during the keynote, your CEO said, let the machines do what they're good at. Yeah.

And that's a philosophy in itself. So is that part of something that you're trying to convey in the marketing side is to let people kind of figure out what should I use the machines for and what should I reserve for the human? Yeah, Absolutely.

And where do I, how do I interact with the machines to set the parameters around what, um, will make me comfortable to trust that the decisions that it makes? Um, one of the things that we showcase was how we use our content aviator, and, and it seemed kind of simple on a demo. Um, but when you think about what AI goes over, it's a data sets now they're governed and organized.

Um, and the way to actually create that trust with what AI can spit back at you is to limit or govern the data sets that it looks at. So, you know, the demo showed kind of three simple data sets, a little checky box that you can just check or uncheck as you're interacting with the ai. That's very one simple example, but we wanna make sure that our software, um, continues to give the humans the choices around where do you want the answers to be filtered from?

How do you want it to interact with which data sets? And that really creates that trust that we believe that people need. It's not, and then it's trust and verify too, right?

We, um, in, in some ways, and that's why a lot of our aviator technology source document go verify things like that. I think these steps will make all of us more comfortable with using AI over time. So was part of the conversation about trust essentially in the, in the platform and AI and getting folks to understand what they can trust and maybe what they should check themselves?

Yeah, Absolutely. Um, and trust in the sense of, you know, do I know where it came from? Do I feel like the right inputs really in the right outputs, but also from a security perspective?

Right. Um, there's a lot of very interesting things. Of course, you know, that's another field where it's like AI, machine versus machine.

Um, some of our technologies now are thinking about, well, are you gonna actually be vulnerable to attacks at the prompt engineering level? And how do you prevent against that application code security, prompt engineering and being injected? Um, so kind of thinking about security at all layers and what it means in the new world of AI versus AI as well.

When you look at the customer side, it seems to me you're touching everybody from rank and file it people all the way up to the CIO and all kinds of C levels across. How do you have that conversation? Because, um, they're so different.

Yeah. So I think that, you know, the notion of having an agent really is solving for, um, an individual's job day to day. Um, how you make a collection of agents, for example, use case useful, uh, for our business has to tie back to the ROI, uh, you know, have lots of discussions with our own CIO, um, and we have, we run internally, you know, AI projects as well.

Um, so you ask yourself as the business side, not just the technical side, um, you know, is it deployed right? Can I trust the results? Okay, well, how am I actually deploying this to realize business results?

Is it preventing risk somehow? Is it, you know, saving me a step somehow? Um, is it making my people more productive?

Do I need less people? Those are the real questions I think all of us are grappling with. Um, so I think really applying ai, um, is, uh, is the phase where we're living in right now.

And There are hard savings and soft savings, but that's not clear to me that everybody always appreciates what the soft savings are. Yeah. Um, and the soft savings is, um, there's, there's multiple angles to that, right?

Because there is the rapid learning. Um, I'll give you an example in my own department that happened to run marketing, right? Um, and you know, for, for kind of this fad of AI we're in, um, if you don't use it, you're behind.

And if you do use it, you have to be smart about when and how you wanna use it. Um, so I do think there's a notion of the soft benefits of saying keeping up with it, um, and being able to say, okay, now the world, particularly the consumer world, is engaging, um, using AI as an interface. So for example, in my field of marketing, it really changes the world of content marketing.

It changes the world of digital marketing. It changes who, what you put on your website, because now it will be interactive with in a whole different medium, right? Just like the way that OpenText and information management is helping people rethink and reimagine how they can engage with their data information.

Um, you know, I, we see it all the time everywhere In my experience there are AI enthusiasts and then there are AI resistors. Mm-Hmm. Um, some of the enthusiasts are a little bit too far down the path and some of the resistors are trying to figure out how to use this thing or what does it mean to me?

How do you kind of, it's, those are emotional issues. So how do you kinda like make people more comfortable with the whole idea? Oh, I, I think, um, I think it's about saying what we wanna apply it to.

Mm-Hmm. Right. Um, and I think it's also about this notion of, um, showing people, um, how it would work.

Um, so I don't think it's so much resistance if it is just the learning curve with anything. Um, and the more that we kind of get comfortable with how it's being used at enterprise business, uh, I think that's kind of our, our challenge now, right? Enterprise business practical applications, um, you know, not so much the, the consumer space or the interface of it all over the chat GPTs of the world.

Um, but really how, how does it help your enterprise? Mm-Hmm. People like to hear how other people are using these things.

So are we getting to the point now where there's enough use cases of using AI that can be shared with people that would get to that comfort level? Yeah, I think so. I think that's spot on, which is, um, sharing people trust what hearing from their peers Mm-Hmm.

Um, hearing from other cho trusted sources, um, and it's gonna take us a while more, um, right. And, and I think most enterprise, um, companies are gonna go do the POC, are gonna wanna get comfortable with it before they, you know, kind of put into production. Hmm.

As we kind of go forward, we're already looking into 2025. What is next year's conference gonna look like to you? Oh, that's a great question.

Um, I do think, you know, we've talked a lot about ai, um, but the notions of multi-cloud and the notions of security are still gonna be dominant themes from OpenText. Um, you know, there's, uh, the AI is a wonderful topic and, but it's one of many, um, we see a huge convergence of cloud security and ai and it really is three big tectonic, you know, shifts going on right now and clouds made AI pervasive that's made security even more relevant. Um, and this three have a lot to do with each other.

Um, so what you're gonna continue to hear from OpenText is that we help to make the multi-cloud work and the notions AI aside of just having zero copy data, just having a single source of truth, uh, and documents and IT assets and all the things of that. That's what's is the landscape that we all live in today. It's hundreds and thousands of applications that sit on your IT landscape and how do you make the business work flow even more seamless?

So making that multi-cloud work and where we're putting our dollars and investments is really around r and d that creates those inter integration points, connectors, um, kind of open architectures and composable applications that plug into everybody else. Um, or, you know, kind of the key things where people are working together. Right.

Um, I don't think you can plug into everything all, all at once, but that's really important. The multi-cloud concept being integrated, um, that's always been kind of where OpenText has honed in. Um, and now that we've had a pretty broad portfolio that was your question earlier, um, we can do it even within OpenText to create a lot of great solutions, um, and be able to help businesses advance, um, what they do.

Do we know where this event's gonna be yet, Uh, coming up next year? Yeah. Uh, we do.

We are actually gonna be in Nashville, Tennessee next year. All right, cool. Um, as you kind of think about all these folks that are out there and what they're trying to experience, do you think that somewhere along the line we've lost that human touch, maybe in the Covid era, we spent too much time online and we forgot that these events are important and these are how we kind of come together as people to kinda share these concepts?

Yeah. Um, I, I don't know if we forget, but we always are reminded when we are here and, um, there's nothing that kind of replaces with problem solving and just meeting up and saying, okay, what, what's your business challenges? How can we help?

Um, and just having that human interaction. Um, so you're absolutely right. I agree.

Um, and I think that even now, um, you know, particularly in the spaces we're in, these are large challenges, right? How do you get your data to work together? How do you, you know, solve for multiple steps and, you know, it pretty complicated landscape that takes problem solving, right?

And these connection points of these events help us to be able to connect the dots, um, and help people kind of open their eyes to how technology can help, how humans can help, how expertise can help, uh, and, uh, be able to work toward, uh, solving the next thing. Alright. And the Nashville event, will we have a date for that yet?

Uh, I do. We do. It is gonna be next November, um, and right about this time of the year.

All right, folks. There's no substitute for actually being there in person. So book that date on your calendar now to be in Nashville.

'cause I promise you it'll be a good time and you'll probably learn something and didn't know. Hey, thanks for being on the show. Thank you.

All right. And we'll be back in a minute.