At Ekasys, we focus on solving tough technical challenges for our clients. In our work with the U.S. Navy, we specialize in surfacing the right, trusted technical data to engineers and maintenance crews to help them keep ships and submarines ready for missions.
Our first really big project with the Navy was around government contracts at NAVSEA, which operates four shipyards for shipbuilding, conversion, and repair. They had been going through a process of digitizing paper documents and needed to have all the information available electronically. Using OpenText Content Management and WebReports, I built an entire contract lifecycle application, which remains in place almost a decade later.
The success of that contract management solution drove increased adoption of OpenText Content Management, which is now also used to manage technical data and documentation both in the shipyards and on the vessels themselves. When a submarine submerges, it loses access to electronic communications, but with the secure offline document storage in Content Management, we can ensure that technicians have access to all the documentation they need. If you’re on a sub and something goes wrong, you’ve got to have the right information at your fingertips, because lives are literally on the line.
Maintaining efficient, secure storage
In the defense sector, data security is naturally a very high priority. One of the areas where we’re looking to introduce OpenText Knowledge Discovery is in ensuring that sensitive data is not left unprotected in forgotten corners of the organization. For example, when an admin leaves their role, they may leave behind a bunch of data imports, exports, database backups sitting in locations with no discovery.
With Knowledge Discovery, we can scour everything and find stuff that shouldn’t still exist. This also drives better efficiency through “de-duplication:” in our initial proof of concept, we freed up almost a terabyte of capacity by having Knowledge Discovery review encrypted files. We didn’t have to look at the documents themselves, we only had to check and verify the report.
Introducing new capabilities
Knowledge Discovery is one of the products I’ve been most excited to try, because it answers the question: How do we summarize and vectorize documents? And that dovetails with the introduction of OpenText Content Aviator, which features a natural-language, embedded generative AI chatbot to help surface and summarize complex information. By combining the two technologies, we’re looking to optimize the creation of procurement documents such as RFIs and RFPs, and to enable the automated evaluation of vendor responses to those requests. We think we’ll be able to make some really good in-roads with OpenText Aviator, because we’ve collected all the relevant data for many years.
With Aviator, one of the initial use cases is the summarization of documents — and we’re planning to include text-to-speech capabilities so that Navy employees can literally talk to the documentation and have it answer their questions. I think that’s going to be a big win for us.
Unlocking the power of agentic AI
Looking at the broader context of AI, we’re planning to use Aviator to introduce a solid AI agentic framework that can augment the capabilities and capacity of existing personnel. In my experience as CTO of a company, I can use large language models to do the work of ten people, and then that’s ten people that I can move to other tasks. So if we can get ten Navy personnel using agentic AI, each doing the work of ten people, then we just scaled by 100: that power is incredible.
I think that with Knowledge Discovery and Aviator, we can start making agents that are specific and fine-tuned on the organization’s data. The big thing will be getting the agents connected to a solid MCP [Model Context Protocol], have them learn from the data, create new tools, and extend the MCP.
Building on firm foundations
As we build out these new capabilities, everything comes back to the quality and stability of the information management we’ve established using OpenText Content Management. Mission readiness for the U.S. Navy depends on having precise, up-to-date information available to the engineers who work on the ships, submarines and other complex physical assets. We use OpenText technology to ensure the integrity, quality and security of that information.
Want to see these results in action? Read this full United States Navy case study to explore how Ekasys and OpenText are keeping U.S. Navy information shipshape with content management and agentic AI.
Read the case study
