AI’s sweet spot lies between hype and criticism: OpenText India MD

OpenText has transformed from on-premises content management (1.0) to information management in hybrid cloud (2.0). Now, OpenText 3.0 focuses on ‘Information Reimagined’, combining cloud-based information management with AI, security, and compliance.

OpenText’s 3.0 journey has been a transformative experience for us. We are building a new AI platform that will help in the automation of product development internally.  It is around ‘Information Re-imagined’ which is basically an Information Management Cloud with AI and with full security and compliance. 

The 3.0 journey pushed us to embrace a cloud-first, AI-driven mindset, and to focus on delivering innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. OpenText 3.0 is all about security, AI, and information management cloud. We are going to be fully on the cloud, but we keep in mind the local regulatory requirements and data sovereignty requirements of certain countries, which means we’ll bring the hyperscaler cloud into the country.

 This is a platform that we intend to use internally for auto-generating the application codes for product development and automating testing. The application code generation will help our developers and especially testers. We can imagine a world in the future where there are some user stories, the business use case stories on which the product development has to happen. You feed into this platform and say that your core language to develop this is Python. It’ll read the user stories and suggest a Python code which the developer can then edit and refine further and then move to the next step of unit testing. Once the developer is happy, then the platform will suggest a test plan or test script for that. The platform itself will help you to test it. Once you approve the test plan and test script. This is not for sale to a customer. This is in pilot with over 2,000 developers testing it. 

The majority of AI and Automation initiatives are being fully developed in India. That’s one of the key elements of India OpenText 3.0, which our CEO entrusted us with. It started like 9-10 months back and we are heavily invested in that. The Indian team played a pivotal role in the development of this platform.  India is going to play a very pivotal role in OpenText 3.0. Security is a key focus area in our 3.0 strategy and as an example of the role of India in the security the managed security operations centre under our cybersecurity practice in India will grow significantly and most likely going to double in size.

Will AI be fully successful? The answer is no. Can it replace everything perfectly? The answer is no. It’s a simple common example. I can say critics and admirers are sitting on the left-hand, and right-hand side of the fence. But the answer is in the middle. You will not leave everything with AI, but you will leave a lot of things with AI. It just depends on how everybody is experimenting maybe the AI might fail in one area – let’s say product development. Maybe it produces a code, then we have to put more effort into correcting it. The efficiency gain is 30 per cent but to rework is another 20 per cent, eventually, a 10 per cent gain is not worth it, but AI-assisted automated testing is most likely 100 per cent guaranteed that it will work well. Therefore in some areas, it will succeed, it will fail. That’s my view.

 Price-wise, the Indian market is definitely challenging. The price point that customers expect here is different; North American pricing or other models won’t work. So, we’ve defined specific packages, solutions, and price points tailored for the Indian market.

We’ve learned these lessons over time, and we’re now seeing significant success. For example, just three months ago, we secured a multi-million dollar deal with a large telecom customer in India. This is a yearly renewable project, highlighting the growing demand for our products and services in the domestic market. This particular customer needed our solutions to streamline their business processes, and we were able to meet their needs effectively. A few other customers in India where we had success in last few years are L&T Technology Services with whom we are partnering to serve strategic Govt institutions, ITC, GAIL, IOCL, and ONGC. 

Previously, we had success stories with only multinational companies that are rolling out in India. But the true India stories have started coming up in the last 24 months or so.

 We have a strong internship program that originated in Hyderabad. We hire close to 300 interns every year. Of those interns, 40 per cent get converted to full-time employees. We started with product development, then we replicated to other units as well - now professional services, customer success, and technical support. It is working very well. And in that process, we have a good affiliation with campuses both in Hyderabad and Bangalore and all India level as well. We have identified, certain universities we work with.