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OpenText's agentic AI glow-up

While OpenText has talked AI agents before, its new vision is a radical departure.

Don Fluckinger
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Published: 19 Nov 2025

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Here among the cowboy hats and dancin' boots, it's agentic AI or bust for OpenText. Yee-haw.

The old boss, Mark Barrenechea, is gone. The new boss isn't a boss, per se, but a cautiously optimistic brain trust convinced that the future of OpenText lies in streamlining its overgrown product line and making a full pivot to an AI company.

"AI, we know, is transformative, but in order for our AI to be effective and to be strong and to avoid any problems, you need great data," said interim CEO James McGourlay. "Managed data is what we really need to get into AI, to make AI effective [and] deliver business value."

Here at OpenText World 2025, the company's largest annual user event, cautious optimism was the vibe as executive vice president, chief product officer and chief technology officer Savinay Berry showed customers the company's vision of the future: a world where everyone has up to a hundred agents helping them do their work, with OpenText "orchestrator agents" enforcing data access policies.

"Every single one of us is going to have our own small army of agents…" Berry said in his keynote. "Domain-specific orchestrators will provide the security, the trust, the policies, the entitlements, things we humans have -- we already are used to the fact that we have access to a certain amount of data. We can't access this. We can't access that. All of that is inherited by these agents as well. That's where the world's going to be."

That doesn't necessarily mean that frontline office workers will begin their days with a prompt, said Michael Cybala, senior vice president of software engineering research and development at OpenText. While other vendors are floating out that idea, Cybala envisions a world where a worker's AI dashboards summarize the day's work based on information that agents gather on what someone has been working on, upcoming deadlines and other points of analysis.

Before that happens, however, Cybala and his colleagues must convince OpenText's customers -- some of whom have enterprise data stored in private cloud and on-premises settings -- to move their data into the company's public-cloud content repositories to activate it for AI.

To be fair, OpenText isn't alone in this situation. Last year, its competitor Hyland also changed its CEO and leaned heavily into AI. Hyland's customer base skews heavily to parsimonious government and educational IT enterprise verticals. Both companies are on similar missions to modernize enterprise content management with AI, said Cheryl McKinnon, an analyst at Forrester Research.

At this year's OpenText World, the company showed customers more of AI's potential for their data, and less of a confusing laundry list of new releases.

"It was a clearer kind of product message today," McKinnon said. "I think a lot of customers are still in very early adoption stages, but it felt like this was more relatable -- in terms of how we get there in OpenText."

Everything old is new again

OpenText, Canada's fourth-largest software company, generated $5.17 billion in annual revenue for its fiscal 2025, which ended on June 30. A reasonable argument could be made that OpenText is the Microsoft of Canada, despite it being a small fraction of Microsoft's size.

But with a new permanent CEO to be named later and mostly homegrown agentic AI tools -- including a custom agent design platform -- previewed on Tuesday, OpenText is betting its future on the demand for this new technology sustaining the company.

While OpenText might not challenge Microsoft anytime soon, its ambitions are to grow while, at the same time, thin the herd of products it acquired under previous CEO Mark Barrenechea. His acquisition strategy, some have described, was to buy distressed assets at pennies on the Loonie -- a Canadian one-dollar coin -- and milk them for all they were worth.

Describing it that way oversimplifies things, considering how the endpoint security tools acquired from Guidance and Carbonite now look like they will come in handy to secure data from rogue AI bots. The acquisition of Documentum not only brought fresh customers to OpenText but also realigned the enterprise competitive landscape in its favor.

OpenText closed the Micro Focus acquisition in early 2023. Analysts, including Deep Analysis's Alan Pelz-Sharpe, have said it might have been too much of a financial stretch and led to the undoing of Barrenechea. Yet a few jewels in Micro Focus's sprawling software catalog led directly to pieces of the upcoming OpenText AI platform, including the Vertica database and another that will drive OpenText Knowledge Discovery, a new tool that will metatag data and make it useful to AI.

So now, OpenText's customers are sitting on a gold mine of data, some of which they have been building for decades. Everyone -- including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft and even Qualtrics -- is vying for a piece of that data and to orchestrate everyone else's AI agents.

It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out competitively over the next few years. OpenText customers we talked to informally at the lunch tables and in the halls of OpenText World, for their part, seemed eager to try the upcoming AI tools to solve longstanding workflow problems.

One holdover from the previous regime, a tribe of furry OpenText AI mascots, persists. It's led by Aviator Ice, a goon-eyed yeti that can charitably be described as Salesforce's Astro on truck-stop speed. He wore a cowboy hat to commemorate Nashville's country music scene and rapped in the vein of a similarly named human, Vanilla Ice.

It's hard for thinking people to justify software company mascots that anthropomorphize abstract technology concepts such as SaaS applications and AI tools. There is, however, one point to be made in their favor: In Astro's 11 years of existence, they -- Salesforce identifies Astro as nonbinary -- have been part of the marketing magic that grew Salesforce's annual revenue almost ninefold.

As researchers love to say, correlation does not imply causation. But OpenText would love it if Aviator Ice's crew helped drive that kind of growth, as ridiculous as all the mascots -- Salesforce's and OpenText's -- might seem.

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.

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