To unlock the full potential of GenAI (accuracy, efficiency, and real productivity gains), organizations must center their strategy in content that is current, well-organized, and well-protected. Ensuring true AI readiness means preparing the information GenAI relies on, making it discoverable, governed, and usable at scale.
Consider these five essential AI readiness questions when building your AI strategy.
1. Do you know the value of the content you already have?
Decades of valuable content – documents, media, and records – is likely sitting unused in shared drives and forgotten repositories due to content sprawl and an inability to organize and make use of it otherwise. Without access, structure, and labeling for context, neither your users nor GenAI can take full advantage of the knowledge within. Gartner® estimates that “Unstructured data such as documents and multimedia files accounts for 70% to 90% of organizational data, and poses unique governance challenges due to its volume, variety and lack of coherent structure. Making it AI-ready is therefore challenging [i].” Ensuring visibility and completeness is a first step toward readiness; you can’t use what you can’t see.
2. Can GenAI access content across processes, or is it siloed?
Even with strong content management foundations, many enterprises still face silos that restrict access. A Foundry survey commissioned by OpenText found that 51% of respondents cite integration with existing systems as a challenge when implementing AI-enhanced content management[ii]. When information is connected and contextualized – without duplication – AI can use it efficiently and securely.
3. Is your content safe and compliant for AI use?
Data governance continues to be a major challenge for AI planning and oversight. Gartner® states that “only 14% of respondents are very confident that their content and data assets are sufficiently secured and governed to provide value for both AI and human interactions [iii].” AI models cannot determine what should remain private; the content itself must include those safeguards. Readiness involves ensuring that sensitive information is identified, classified, and protected before AI processes it.
4. Is your content usable and optimized, and ready for AI?
AI delivers its best responses when information is enriched with metadata and relationships, building a helpful knowledge graph. If data lacks structure or meaning, even the most advanced models will produce inconsistent results. Preparation turns content into knowledge, adding the context GenAI needs to generate relevant, reliable, and grounded responses. Some content, such as audio and video, may not be properly prepared for GenAI to make use of it; transcription turns audio into text that can be used, and object and speaker identification can help to build context and meaning as well. Prepping your content for full GenAI access requires building a full profile of the information within.
5. Can you maintain AI readiness at scale?
AI readiness is not a one-time task. It’s a continuous process of discovery, governance, and enrichment across millions of files and formats. This is where intelligent automation becomes essential. OpenText™ Knowledge Discovery helps enterprises operationalize AI readiness – automating classification, enrichment, and governance so information stays trusted, compliant, and ready for GenAI.
AI readiness isn’t about AI infrastructure and LLMs alone: it requires knowing, understanding, and preparing your information so AI can perform responsibly and effectively. With the right planning, and intelligent automation, organizations can greatly improve their AI outcomes, by creating raw information into rich grounding context. Build a winning AI strategy through a complete AI readiness program.
To learn how to accelerate your AI readiness with OpenText Knowledge Discovery, join our webinar. We will unpack essentials, share pitfalls to avoid, and show how outcomes improve when information is prepared in the right way.
[i] Gartner Report, Governing Unstructured Data for AI Readiness: A Strategic Roadmap, By Melody Chien, August 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
[ii] Foundry Research sponsored by OpenText, MarketPulse Survey: The Role of GenAI in Modernizing Content Management, May 2025
[iii] Gartner Report, Assessing the Impact of Generative AI and Agentic AI In Enterprise Applications, By Max Goss, Matt Cain, Craig Roth, Clarissa Sargeant, September 2025
