Like many industry events, OpenText Summit Africa 2023 was as much focused on the future as it was the present. These days it is difficult to discuss anything involving technology, or life in general, without the thought of AI in the back of your head.
Long touted as the next step for humanity, it is only in the last few months that the real power of AI has shown itself in the form of new and advanced large language model AIs.
To properly look at just how impactful this is, a rather special talk was held at the event. Entitled “6 September 2030: How did OpenText manage to predict the future?”, the talk takes the form of a news story from the future of 2030. The theme of ‘Business 2030″ was front and centre for OpenText Summit Africa 2023, and this talk takes that idea to the extreme.
This is all very timely as OpenText is, right now, rolling out its AI platform in the form of opentext.ai. This innovative approach to AI focuses on how information and content management can be done at scale with AI at its heart. opentext.ai takes the form of OpenText Aviator, a suite of generative AI solutions that can live on the cloud and guide your company, organisation or even governmental body towards the optimal results.
The talk was hosted by Arno Hanekom, Digital Strategist at Datacentrix and Phil Anderson, Sales Leader at Datacentrix.
Through this idea of looking back from the future, both Hanekom and Anderson really want to relay this key piece of insight: AI is going to save everyone both time and money – the two most sought after resources in the world. Today, tomorrow and in 2030, every cent and every second that can be saved will be more important, and there will be no better way to save than by leveraging AI.
“To be frank [the legal department] was costing the company an awful lot of money. My content was distributed in many different data stores and what my lawyers needed to do – great lawyers as they are – is to look through that content in lots of different places. SharePoint repositories, network storage, people’s hard drives, just everywhere. I was having to pay so much in third party lawyer fees because the lawyers on hand were stuck searching through content,” Anderson explains in an example.
The costly business of law is just one arena where bills can quickly escalate to unsustainable levels and, today, there is sometimes no way around it.
And here’s where AI comes in. In this example, all those disparate sources of data can be pooled into the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid solution. This export and consolidation of content is a process that many believe is very expensive and time consuming, but AI can streamline the process with automation.
No longer does the content need to be carefully analysed, tagged and catalogued by a professional human with large hourly fees, but the AI can do the hard work and that professional can come in after and double-check the work.
Once all the content is in one place, the work of the lawyers becomes not only easier but also faster, saving time and money. While lawyers and legal matters were the example at OpenText Summit Africa 2023, it can be applied to just about every industry. Imagine the civil engineer who should be doing more important work, but needs to spend many costly hours searching for building records. Think of an architect designing a house who needs to stop their work to research the area. Even doctors can be helped with easier access to vital information that would have taken days of manual research.
The brilliance of AI is that it can do the busy work that is needed, but still wastes valuable time. These pitfalls of time and money are a thing of the past, right now.
“I think what we’re trying to bring across with this [look into the future] is that generative AI is actually here today. It’s available now. What we’re talking about now isn’t futuristic, it’s modern,” Hanekom concludes.
