The News: On October 11, as the key element of OpenText World 2023, OpenText announced the latest release of its Cloud Editions 23.4, which includes an expansive range of AI capabilities. A key component of the company’s AI vision is OpenText Aviator. OpenText Aviator is a family of practical generative AI capabilities, including use case-specific Aviators, such as:
- OpenText IT Operations Aviator: A generative AI virtual agent for OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX) that combines large language models (LLMs) with OpenText data security expertise to facilitate self-service, faster issue/ticket resolution. According to Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub, Aviator, guided by permissions, can automate trouble ticket resolution.
- OpenText DevOps Aviator: Leverages generative AI to provide development managers, software engineers, and project management offices (PMOs) with a proactive project management agent. OpenText says this Aviator can predict the time it takes to deliver features, prevent issues from leaking into production, improve test coverage and build tests with less coding, and gain visibility to achieve faster velocity.
- OpenText Business Network Aviator: Accelerates the identification and onboarding of new suppliers to supply chain operations. Procurement teams and supply chain leaders can search for new suppliers based on specific risk-based criteria and initiate an onboarding process to establish a business-to-business (B2B) connection.
Read Muhi Majzoub’s post about the OpenText Cloud Editions 23.4 release on the OpenText website.
Read the full OpenText press release on opentext.ai and OpenText Aviator on the company’s website.
Evaluating OpenText Aviator, Part 2: Leading AI Use Cases
Analyst Take: OpenText’s Aviators highlighted earlier are the kind of AI applications the enterprise market needs right now – applications with a very specific purpose and job.
Do We Have Any Silver Bullet Generative AI Use Cases?
If you take a step back and look at what the generative AI moment has produced to date for enterprise, it has been mostly tools for playing with generative AI – the picks and shovels enterprises need at the development and IT levels. Why is that?
Part of the reason is that no one has productized any sure fire, silver bullet, killer use cases. There are several with great promise. There is code development and commercial image generation from the likes of Adobe, Shutterstock, and Getty Images, both of which are legitimate applications with well-identified ROI, though please note that both of these use cases – code generation and image generation – continue to face market headwinds and barriers – particularly around copyright and intellectual property (IP) rights. Collaboration tools such as meeting summaries, transcription, and translation from companies such as Zoom, Cisco, and Microsoft show a lot of promise.
For a moment, I will continue to state my case for being skeptical about many of the text generation use cases. You can read my argument against text generation here: A Manifesto Against Generative AI Writing. I will add that I do not think there is a legitimate market need for automatron-like robo sales and marketing emails, but we will address that market need or lack of in another time and place. (Are many text generation use cases essentially a manufactured market?)
Software as a Service Leadership in AI Use Cases
Which brings us back to OpenText’s Aviators. What we need more of in the marketplace are software as a service (SaaS) companies (and others) that have done the AI use case thinking for enterprises. We need more SaaS companies such as OpenText to show the market specific use cases for AI: we have designed an AI to make the applications you buy from us better, this AI improves our applications this way, etc.
In sitting with OpenText’s Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub, it was clear to me that this idea of embedding AI, such as Aviators, into the company’s software and applications is its vision and intent. An Aviator that automates IT trouble tickets is something we understand and can see the immediate value of. An Aviator that is an assistant in easing project management offers the same kind of understandable use case and reassurance. It is specific.
Most companies will experiment with AI and build IP around AI capabilities. But they are not going to do it for everything. Enterprises increasingly rely on SaaS vendors to provide them with ready-made and purpose-built tools that tackle capabilities and functions that are not core to their own business.
Conclusions
OpenText’s Aviators are new, so there is no way to know how successful the company will be with them. It is clear that OpenText has stepped up its AI game to a new level, and through OpenText Aviators, the market becomes more educated about what an AI can do, how well it can perform a specific task, and whether it can be trusted. These types of pragmatic applications — and there are other SaaS companies building purpose-specific AI, such as Adobe, Salesforce, Zoom, Microsoft, Zendesk, ServiceNow and others — might not only gain a competitive edge but also help the market as a whole understand and adopt AI technology.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Evaluating OpenText Aviator: The Emergence of Enterprise AI Platforms
OpenText Aviator Delivers Generative AI Use Cases Beyond CX
OpenText Reports Strong Q4 and FY 2023 Earnings, Driven by Cloud and ARR Growth
Author Information
Mark comes to The Futurum Group from Omdia’s Artificial Intelligence practice, where his focus was on natural language and AI use cases.
Previously, Mark worked as a consultant and analyst providing custom and syndicated qualitative market analysis with an emphasis on mobile technology and identifying trends and opportunities for companies like Syniverse and ABI Research. He has been cited by international media outlets including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and CNET. Based in Tampa, Florida, Mark is a veteran market research analyst with 25 years of experience interpreting technology business and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.
