Hyland continues pivot to AI-fueled enterprise platform

Enterprise content management company Hyland made bold changes in mid-2024. Longtime CEO Bill Priemer retired, and former Informatica chief product officer Jitesh Ghai took the helm at a time when most tech companies either had shifted to AI-first product models or had plans underway to do so.

Hyland users -- like those of its competitor OpenText, which is also making an AI pivot -- are a diverse group of enterprises with content in public cloud, private cloud and on-premises instances. Ghai is charged with bringing Hyland's product line -- which includes its flagship OnBase and acquisitions such as Alfresco and Nuxeo -- into its unified Content Innovation Cloud, powered by agentic AI.

Editor's note: This Q&A was edited for clarity and brevity.

How does your experience at Informatica translate to your position as Hyland president and CEO?

Jitesh Ghai: There are a lot of parallels. Both companies have focused on data, and after 30 years, they have demonstrated incredible market leadership and an incredibly loyal customer base.

As chief product and technology officer at Informatica, I really led the charge of their transformation to the cloud, their transformation from a single product to multiple cloud and AI services in a single, elastic, serverless, consumption-based cloud platform. In the process, we redefined ETL and data management from tools to a platform, applicable to the market and industry.

I spent 14 years working on all things structured data. And the question I would get asked is, "Jitesh, I love what you're doing for my structured data. What can you do for my unstructured data?" Content management was perennially a black box. That has all changed now that the technology exists, now that we all had our collective ChatGPT moment in Q4 of 2022, where, through large language models, you can give structure to unstructured data. So, you can now do the things that we've been able to do with structured data -- without structured data.

Do Hyland customers see unstructured data as a business asset or a storage problem?

Ghai: It depends on the organization, the CIO, the chief data officer. There are some conversations I have with CIOs where they tell me they love the operational outcomes of process automation with unstructured data -- such as patient onboarding, patient referrals, claims processing and insurance in healthcare; transcript processing for higher education student enrollment; or mortgage and loan approvals for banks. They want generative AI to enable their organization to do that, and data lakehouse, data warehousing vendors are telling them to move unstructured data out of content management and into their systems, where they will turn on GenAI.

What they don't understand is that the second that happens, they break compliance, the very purpose the ECM [enterprise content management] system serves. Hyland has the benefit of being a trusted custodian for 14,000 customers, hundreds of petabytes of the most mission-critical unstructured data across the most regulated industries. We AI-enable unstructured data, derive from it deeper context, and deliver agentic AI outcomes by AI enabling the very workflows that we've been automating over the last several years across these industries.

Cloud migration isn't a new concept, but many CIOs still hesitate to make the complete transition. What's holding them back?

Ghai: What makes Hyland truly special is that the customers we serve are in highly regulated industries. The content we are custodians of is extremely sensitive, including loan documents, mortgage documents, bank documents and patient data. We are not asking our customers to move to the cloud. In fact, we are meeting our customers where they are, and we recognize their regulatory challenges and the sensitive nature of what they're doing through our cloud. Our cloud is a hybrid architecture. It's a multi-cloud architecture. So, we're cloud agnostic.

We are hybrid and multi-cloud. Our customers, who have invested 10, 15 or 20 years in building out their unstructured data ECM environments and mission-critical workflows, operate within those environments. And through our cloud and AI architecture, we can AI-enable them in their environments, behind their firewalls, within their data centers, within their AWS, Azure or GCP tenant.

My point of view is that delivering AI and cloud-powered value should not start with a content migration. That's a travesty.

My point of view is that delivering AI and cloud-powered value should not start with a content migration. That's a travesty. We want to provide value from day one. When they're ready to migrate their repository to the cloud, we can rationalize other repositories into Hyland's elastic, serverless cloud repository as well.

Hyland has discussed how its own agents and AI tools work across other ECMs. What are the most common scenarios where this would happen?

Ghai: In global enterprises, there continues to be fragmentation, as there is no single ECM or file system. There's continuous M&A. Data is growing and more fragmented than ever before in the enterprise, and 80% of it is unstructured.

We're talking about AI and automation. So, when I talk to CIOs or CEOs -- and I speak to their customers and other executives on that level, sometimes the idea of AI and automation is quite enticing, but they haven't yet figured out how to draw business results from that -- bottom-line payoffs on their investments.

Where do your customers see measurable returns from AI investment in content management, ECM, and knowledge management and all that?

Ghai: To really deliver outcomes for your enterprise, you need to AI-enable your enterprise data and not use a model that's been trained on the internet. Bring your favorite large language model for your favorite use case and use it against your enterprise data.

Workflows, combined with AI-enabled enterprise data, can deliver agentic outcomes. Those who have implemented ECM have been building the foundation to AI enable their enterprise, whether or not they realized it.

Because how do you AI enable your enterprise? It's your enterprise data combined with a deep understanding of your business processes.

CIOs are often caught between keeping the lights on and driving new transformation initiatives. How do you advise them to strike a balance?

Ghai: This is central to our strategy of meeting customers where they are. There's an immense amount of learning that we have collectively done as innovators, as technologists, as CIOs, as product builders.

The number one principle is to deliver business value on day one, not blow up your entire enterprise tech stack and build out a completely new tech stack. Thoughtfully AI-enable existing processes, with existing data, within existing systems and their workflows, and incrementally evolve. Then reinvent processes. Reinvent how you operate and serve customers, and how you bring new products and services and deliver new customer experiences.

How do you think the role of the CIO will evolve as content systems become more autonomous and AI-driven?

Ghai: Five years is an eternity in this world. I tend to track every two weeks!

We are collectively in the process of learning, discovering and operationalizing a completely different dimension and level of enterprise automation, all delivered through your enterprise data. Three years from now, CIOs and other line-of-business technologists will be thinking through how they will automate their organizations. How will they enable their people to engage with their agents while these agents are going to be unburdening their knowledge workers from the mundane so that they can work on the most critical jobs?

Just as they learned how to work with personal computers and transform their businesses with cloud, social and mobile technologies, there will be a focus on learning how to work with an underlying, agentic infrastructure of automation -- while collaborating with each other more than ever before.

That's the most exciting part for me: unlike any previous wave of technology, whether it's a mainframe, personal computer, a minicomputer, the internet, social media, mobile or cloud … Every one delivered radical value across industries globally but required us to spend more time with screens, clicking on more buttons. This AI wave promises to unburden us from the mundane so that we can spend more time with each other.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.