LAS VEGAS — Building on the theme of last year’s OpenText World, where the company went all-in on artificial intelligence across its portfolio, CEO Mark Barrenechea Tuesday made the case for what he calls “Business AI,” the integration of AI into all aspects of business.

Speaking in a keynote opening of the 2024 edition of OpenText World, Barrenechea said we’re currently on the “third wave” of business AI, with predictive analytics and more intelligent search and generative AI already in the rear-view mirror. He described the current focus as “agents to unlock human potential.”

In this context, agents are autonomous bits of code that make decisions on behalf of their human owners. Although, at the moment, limited to specific use cases, Barrenechea said agents could help humans make more intelligent and better decisions faster. In OpenText’s offerings, the company offers 100+ specific agents at the moment, with the road map for that to expand significantly over the coming year. Those are used by, and represented in, the company’s 15 “Aviators,” its broader AI bots with which users interact throughout its software.

“We believe that AI is for every industry and will be embedded everywhere,” Barrenechea told attendees.

However, the current age of agents is only a step toward what Barrenechea sees coming next, what he describes as “agentic AI and autonomous agents,” where these agents will have enough knowledge, experience and understanding to make broader decisions on users’ behalf.

Throughout his presentation, Barrenechea often borrowed from Agent Smith in The Matrix, who expressed the sentiment that you “never send a human to do a machine’s job.” Still, the CEO admitted this would not always be an easy transition.

“This is going to be uneasy; this is going to challenge us,” Barrenechea said but expressed confidence that business would get a lot of value out of agents talking to other agents and solving complex multi-step business problems without human intervention.

Business AI is a critical element of the company’s Titanium X roadmap for its Cloud Editions software, slated to be fully realized by the middle of next year. Barrenechea said several times that “Titanium X is real” and demonstrated aspects of the roadmap that are appearing starting in this quarter’s Cloud Editions 24.4 release, officially announced here.

“The future is powered by business clouds for information management, business AI for talent, and business technology for secure multi-cloud integration,” he said, adding that any organization’s talent and data are its two biggest “proprietary gifts.”

Barrenechea also argued for the role of the AI data cloud and OpenText’s focus on integrating cloud-based services, both its own and those of others. He said the company’s automation, applications, and workflows, “everything you see from our software,” can be delivered via API through its Thrust Services. He said the combination of Thrust Services, Business AI, and its Aviator bots has “reached a critical mass.”

“More and more customers are not just using automations, but building applications, and partners are building on these services to go to market with their own applications,” he said.

With the topic being AI and a company’s critical data, Barrenechea stressed that OpenText would “make security as important as anything we do in what we provide to you.”

“Security needs to be job one,” he said, a key consideration in the design of all the company’s offerings and not something handled at the IT manager or data centre level.

He detailed the company’s new OpenText Cybersecurity Cloud as an engine for the company’s efforts to “build, protect, detect and respond” on the security front. 

He told attendees about the company’s security efforts and that the company is making two significant pushes over the next year. First, he said, all of the company’s data will be masked, whether at rest, in motion, or being processed.

“We’re so confident we’re going to do it first, and we hope you’ll follow suit,” he said.

Second, he declared passwords dead at OpenText and announced a move to biometrics across the board over the next two years. He said the company would protect its data using fingerprints, retinal scans, voice recognition, and facial recognition.

“We’re going to change the game in terms of trust over the next two years,” he said.