Operating question
Where can the company win?
The work identified priority business units, use cases, industries, installed-base opportunities, and new-logo motions rather than treating AI as an undifferentiated market.
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OpenText Aviator · AI brand activation, portfolio alignment, and commercialization
Turning an enterprise AI identity into a commercial system.
As generative AI became a priority for customers and executives, nearly every technology company needed an AI story. The harder part was making that story useful: connecting it to real products, real customer problems, and a market motion that sellers and customers could actually use.
The challenge
Move from announcement to adoption.
An AI launch can create attention quickly. Adoption requires much more.
OpenText introduced Aviator as the shared identity for AI capabilities across its information management portfolio. The idea had natural strength. OpenText had spent decades helping large organizations manage, protect, govern, and use information, including in regulated and security-sensitive environments. Aviator created a way to connect that foundation to a new generation of AI-enabled work.
But a shared identity across a broad portfolio creates an operating challenge. Content management, cybersecurity, DevOps, IT operations, business networks, experience, analytics, and legal technology serve different buyers and solve different problems. The company needed enough consistency to build recognition without reducing every product and use case to the same generic AI message.
Customers need to understand what the technology does, why they should trust it, and where it fits into the way their people already work. Sellers and partners need language, demonstrations, and proof that can survive a serious customer conversation. Product teams need marketing to stay inside the boundaries of what is available and valuable. Leadership needs to know whether the market motion is creating usage, opportunities, and revenue rather than noise.
For Aviator, this meant connecting one company-level identity to several distinct commercial paths:
- Help customers see practical AI use cases inside the information and workflows they already manage.
- Translate technical capabilities into business outcomes such as productivity, workflow automation, search, summarization, security, and governance.
- Equip sellers and partners to carry a consistent story into account conversations.
- Build selected experiences that made an abstract enterprise technology easier to understand and try.
- Coordinate execution across products, business units, industries, regions, events, digital channels, and customer programs.
- Create a measurement model that could follow the work from engagement into adoption and pipeline.
My role
My teams brought the platform into market.
OpenText leadership, the CMO, Brand, Product Marketing, product teams, and creative partners shaped the Aviator strategy, identity, and product narrative. I was part of the cross-functional leadership effort that turned that direction into market activation.
At the time, I led the organization responsible for web, marketing technology, analytics and reporting, global campaigns, paid media and digital, lifecycle, account-based marketing, field marketing, and partner marketing. Those were many of the teams and systems through which customers, sellers, partners, and regions would experience Aviator.
Our work was to activate that brand platform in the market. Working with Brand, Product Marketing, business units, Sales, and agencies, we sequenced Aviator within broader go-to-market plans and used it where it strengthened a relevant product, solution, event, audience, or account story rather than treating it as a label for every motion.
My teams activated Aviator through event experiences and demonstrations, web pages, digital advertising, campaigns, regional programs, field and partner activity, lifecycle communications, strategic-account motions, and support for sales plays. Marketing technology, analytics, and reporting teams also created dedicated dashboard views for Aviator-branded products and programs, connecting engagement to account activity, qualified opportunities, pipeline movement, and broader business-unit performance.
My role was to connect that work across the operating system: align the sequence, make the dependencies visible, and use the reporting to see where the platform was gaining traction or where execution needed to change. The result was a shared market architecture designed to build recognition while remaining grounded in product truth and flexible enough for different businesses and buyers to use.
The operating model
Connect brand, demand, and customer adoption.
As the program evolved, the team moved beyond launch activity toward a more explicit path from market interest to customer usage and commercial opportunity.
The operating model connected four questions that are too often managed separately:
Operating question
What should the customer do next?
Programs were designed around concrete experiences such as demonstrations, learning, selected trials and workshops, account conversations, and activation support for relevant offerings.
Operating question
How will Sales and partners carry it?
Campaigns were linked to seller readiness, account targeting, opportunity stages, and business-unit plays so the story could enter real commercial conversations.
Operating question
How will leadership know it is working?
The dedicated dashboard views followed Aviator-branded products and programs from engagement and account activity into qualified opportunities, pipeline movement, adoption barriers, and early commercial evidence.
Internal program reporting later showed early opportunity and adoption signals, new qualified opportunities, movement in stalled opportunities, and renewed engagement in opportunities that had previously gone quiet. Those measures were not evidence that a brand alone created revenue. They showed that the broader market motion was beginning to connect the AI narrative to measurable commercial activity.
Creative activation
Make the technology more approachable.
Aviator also demonstrated that enterprise technology does not have to feel remote or abstract. Event experiences, demonstrations, visual characters, merchandise, and other creative elements helped make the story more approachable for customers and employees.
That energy mattered, but it worked because it sat beside a serious enterprise proposition: trusted information, security, governance, useful workflows, and measurable value. The creative system opened the door. Product truth and commercial execution had to carry the conversation forward.
What changed
From launch identity to a shared market framework.
Aviator began to develop beyond a launch identity into a shared market framework connecting AI capabilities across the portfolio to customer use cases, seller activity, adoption programs, and performance reporting. The operating value was a repeatable way to carry a company-level direction through the teams creating market activity and into the reporting leadership used to evaluate progress.
The organization gained:
- A more recognizable way to present AI across a complex product portfolio.
- A common architecture that business units and regions could adapt without losing coherence.
- A bridge from brand expression to campaigns, accounts, events, partners, and customer experiences.
- A clearer path from awareness to learning, trial, adoption, opportunity creation, and expansion.
- An operating view of what customers accepted, where they hesitated, and what prevented adoption.
The story was no longer simply that OpenText had AI. It was that the company was learning how to help customers apply AI securely to the information and work that mattered to them.
The leadership lesson
Brand activation is an organizational capability.
A company does not build credibility by approving an identity. Credibility grows when product teams can substantiate the promise, sellers can explain it, marketing teams can carry it through events, web, digital advertising, campaigns, partners, and accounts, and leaders can see the impact through shared reporting.
I did not need to own every part of Aviator to have an important role in making it work. I was part of the leadership effort around the initiative, and I led many of the teams responsible for bringing it into the market. My job was to connect those teams with the specialists holding other parts of the answer, keep ambition grounded in product truth, and build the operating rhythm that helped move the idea into real customer and commercial activity.
That is what Aviator reinforced for me: the strongest technology narratives become valuable when they move through the whole company and arrive as something a customer can understand, trust, and use.