Artificial intelligence has moved from lab curiosity to boardroom mandate—yet most pilots stall before production. Gartner estimates up to 85 percent of AI pilots never scale (Gartner via Forbes Tech Council, Nov 2024) because their models can’t reach trustworthy data – much of which is contained in documents that hold decisive context. AI content enablement—capturing, enriching, and governing unstructured content inside core business processes—is the missing link.
OpenText Extended ECM (xECM) embeds that link directly from SAP. By binding every contract, invoice, and maintenance manual to the same business data that drives transactions, xECM delivers governed, contextual content to any AI service the instant it’s needed.
Picture an incident‑response bot faced with three urgent questions:
Each query has a correct answer buried somewhere in a procedure, a policy, or a design drawing. Yet without the proper link between that document and the business transaction in SAP, the language model is forced to guess. When it does, confidence plummets, and the pilot never graduates to production.
AI alone isn’t the villain here. Low‑quality or context‑free content starves the model of the relationships it needs—vendor ID to invoice image, asset tag to maintenance manual, contract clause to purchase order. Until those links exist, the smartest algorithm will hallucinate its way into irrelevance.
Structured data—tables inside SAP, CRM, or a data warehouse—already enjoys the limelight. Unstructured content, however, is the understudy that knows all the lines but can’t reach the stage. OpenText xECM changes that dynamic the moment a document lands inside SAP:
Once that context is in place, language models, Joule Agents, or any other AI service can retrieve exactly the right content at inference time—no additional data lake, no overnight exports. The gold is already refined.
Every organisation asks, “Where do we start?” To answer that, Qellus uses a simple five‑stage maturity model:
How to use the model: Take a moment and place your company on that spectrum. Wherever you land, remember that contextual content is the accelerator. Organisations that store unstructured data in xECM, already linked to SAP processes, tend to jump an entire stage faster than peers who must retrofit metadata later.
Invoice automation is hardly new, yet finance teams still spend hours chasing exceptions. With AI, every incoming invoice image is automatically stamped with vendor ID and purchase‑order number. A language model can then extract line‑item data, reconcile totals, and route exceptions—cutting manual touches by up to 70 percent in early pilots.
Legal and procurement teams drown in redlines. By training an LLM on contracts already versioned in xECM—and therefore tied to the originating PO in SAP—the model surfaces risky clauses, flags compliance gaps, and even suggests fallback language. Review cycles shrink from weeks to days.
Policies stored in xECM come pre‑tagged with regulation codes and effective dates. An AI agent scans revisions for prohibited phrases, automatically notifies document owners, and maintains an audit trail. Auditors no longer request “evidence”; they access it live.
Field technicians rarely have time to sift through a 200‑page manual while equipment is down. An agent queries xECM for that asset’s exact revision and provides a step‑by‑step procedure—hands‑free via voice if necessary—minutes after arriving on‑site. Mean time to repair drops 30 percent, and first‑time‑fix rates climb.
Think of the solution as three tightly coupled layers:
Because the content never leaves its governed repository, auditability remains intact while AI becomes vastly more intelligent.
AI won’t wait, and neither will your competitors. If you already run SAP and store content in OpenText, you are sitting on a gold mine most pilots never reach. Book an AI Readiness Assessment with Qellus, and in four weeks we’ll show you exactly which documents, transactions, and processes can deliver measurable AI value first.
Let’s turn unstructured chaos into trusted insight—and prove that your next AI pilot will be the one that scales.