Dean Clayton, Senior Product Manager, Service Management at OpenText will be taking to the stage at SITS for Teach Your Workflows to Think (So You Don’t Have To).
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Talking with customers and seeing their reaction when our AI capabilities in OpenText Service Management start delivering real results.
There’s a genuine moment of excitement when they see it working in their own environment making a measurable difference.
If I’m honest though, it’s what happens next, those moments, when they start connecting the dots and imagining what else they can automate with Aviator Agent workflows, are always incredibly rewarding.
What’s one workflow that you’ve seen AI transform in a way that genuinely surprised you?
We’ve seen some impressive ideas emerge in product development — from chatbots that can fulfil requests end to end without human intervention, to AI helping accelerate the product development process itself. But I’m going to give an example from one of our customers.
They had recently completed training on our Aviator agent workflow capabilities and were eager to put in action, specifically, removing manual effort involved to assign tickets to the right teams. After an initial sharing of ideas and approaches, they moved incredibly quickly and built an Aviator Agent workflow for ticket assignment.
What made it particularly interesting was that they didn’t rely solely on looking at similar historical tickets.
Instead, they took a document-centric approach: documenting what each team is responsible for and then using AI to interpret that information and determine the most appropriate assignment.
For me, that was a great example of where this technology is heading. Document-centric configuration feels like the next step beyond traditional low-code or no-code approaches, helping organisations get value faster, while giving business / service owners more direct control over how their services are delivered.
How did you get into agentic AI and what made you realise rule-based automation wasn’t enough?
As a Product Manager, we started looking at how to apply GenAI in our product back in early 2023. At the time, many of the demonstrations in the market were focused on relatively simple chatbot scenarios, but it was clear to us that the potential went far beyond that. We could see an opportunity to use AI not just to answer questions, but to actively streamline and improve support operations.
In 2024, we released our first iteration of autonomous AI capabilities, designed not just for user interaction through a chatbot, but to enable AI to take action and get work done independently.
Initially, this was focused on simpler tasks, but even then, it was obvious that support operations were entering a new era.
Rules are useful when every step is predictable, but real support environments are often more dynamic and nuanced than that. Agentic AI opens the door to handling those complexities in a much more flexible and scalable way.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
For me, it’s all about the conversations. I’m really looking forward to meeting people at the booth and in my session, hearing about the challenges they’re trying to solve, and understanding what they want to achieve with AI.
Those interactions are incredibly valuable. Of course, they’re a chance to show how our products can help but just as importantly, they often spark new ideas. Some of the best use cases come directly from those discussions, where a real-world challenge opens up a new way of thinking about how AI can be applied.
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
That AI doesn’t have to be intimidating. Every organisation has its own path when it comes to trust and adoption, and there are plenty of ways to start small, move at the right pace, and still see meaningful value.
SITS – Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.