Hyland yesterday launched an ambitious product release that connects people, unstructured data, and processes and prepares customers to use agent AI in their enterprise content.
It released Enterprise Context Engine, a continuously updated data model that adds structure to unstructured data, and Enterprise Agent Mesh, a package of specialized agents that execute document processing workflows for enterprise departments such as customer service, accounting, and sales.
Later this year, we will release AI Control Tower to manage agents and their interactions, as well as ontologies for the education, healthcare, and banking industries.
Agent Lifecycle Management will also be released later this year and includes tools to catalog agents, certify them for production use against corporate standards, and provide monitoring and governance. It also includes starter agents for orchestrations, tasks, and documentation, allowing users to customize their own agents without starting from scratch.
Jitesh Ghai, CEO of Hyland, said AI will revolutionize what he calls “human ETL”, a common automated process for working with structured data: extraction, transformation, and loading.
In most organizations, humans still manually perform tasks like ETL on unstructured data in documents. Guy predicted that Agent AI will remove much of the manual work from daily operations for Hyland’s approximately 15,000 customers, whether it’s loading unstructured data into systems of record or moving it through business processes such as approvals and decision-making.
“In the world of structured data, everything has been automated by machines for decades,” Guy said. “If you can give structure to unstructured data, and you can give structure to information sources that have business context in the underlying data, you can automate all of this human ETL. [too]. ”
AI is getting slower day by day.
Guy, a former chief product officer at data management company Informatica, took over Highland in 2024. Deep Analysis founder Alan Peltz-Sharp said Guy has positively changed Hyland’s direction and strategy by narrowing down its product line and focusing on developing new AI tools and supporting cloud apps and services.
We recognize that customers are not going to retire and replace ECM systems that have been in place for, in some cases, 20 years, Peltzsharp continued. He oversaw a much-needed roadmap reset to move legacy customers, many of them in regulated industries and on legacy platforms, to a world of agent AI where AI runs on top.
Or, as Ghai puts it, “meeting customers where they are through multi-cloud, hybrid, self-managed architectures.”
Despite the need for a refreshed strategy and updated product focus, Hyland is in the same position as many of its peers in enterprise content management, digital experience, and customer experience. Most customer agent AI initiatives are still in the evaluation and testing phase.
After two years of developing agent AI systems, the time is now for these technology vendors to demonstrate that large-scale AI projects that require changing processes, solving data access and governance issues, and controlling agents are more than just hype and are worth the investment.
“We need to see Highland’s long-term customers, like credit unions and hospitals, say, ‘Wow, we did this, we have the technology,'” he said. “these [projects] These are no small jobs and demand a lot from our customers.
“It doesn’t have to be an agent company. I think it’s fine to have agent departments and processes. For all of these companies, and Hyland is no exception, the problem is no longer technology, if ever it was. The problem is how do you convince customers that this is worth the effort and that it will work.”
That said, content management vendors and their customers are more AI-ready than, say, users of customer experience management platforms. They have what AI needs to thrive: enterprise data.
“Hyland is actually in a good position to make this happen because they own the content and it’s money,” Peltzsharp said.
Enterprise Context Engine and Enterprise Agent Mesh are available now. The industry ontology is expected to be released later this month. Agent lifecycle management and control tower is planned for Q3. All of these tools were released or previewed at Hyland’s CommunityLive user conference in Orlando, Florida.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience, and content management. As a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, I provide award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders leverage complex technology to improve customer and employee experiences. Any tips? send him an email.
