At OpenText World 2025 in Nashville, technology is only as powerful as the people who use it. In this OpenStudio interview, we explore how OpenText Learning Services enables the entire ecosystem—employees, customers, partners, and practitioners—with standardized, role-based learning journeys and certifications. From using AI for translation and content development to embedding OTSM in the learning management system itself, discover how skills enablement drives adoption, accelerates time to value, and ensures solution success in customers' own language and context.

Watch the full interview:

Introduction

Ajit Yohannan: Hello everyone. Welcome to Nashville. Welcome to OpenText World 2025. I am Ajit Yohannan and here we are in the OpenStudio, our own podcast platform, and we're having a lot of interesting conversations here. I reached out to somebody in the organization to talk about learning services and I know this team does a lot of work behind the scenes enabling our future talent in the new technology. So please join me in welcoming Jillian Alexander Global Vice President of Learning Services at OpenText. Welcome to the show.

Jillian Alexander: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

First OpenText World Experience

Ajit: I just want to start by asking, what's been your experience so far?

Jillian: It's been fantastic. This is my first personal OpenText World. I didn't have the opportunity to get here before, so it's been wonderful to meet with our partners, our customers, and even meet some employees in my team that I hadn't ever met before in 5 years. So there's definitely no substitution for being together in person.

Ajit: Yeah, it's a great place to bring our colleagues and everybody together, so glad you could do that.

Learning Services: Enabling the Entire Ecosystem

Ajit: I also want this conversation around learning services—it's one of our key offerings to our customers, to our partners. You want to talk about it, how you're helping our customers through this?

Jillian: Yeah, I'm happy to. So when we think about who needs OpenText skills, we're really thinking about our entire ecosystem. So whether you're a customer, an employee, a partner, a third party practitioner that's staking careers on implementing or supporting OpenText software, everybody needs to know the right skills and knowledge for the way that they work with our tools. So we have a very pragmatic approach, role-based learning journeys that are gated by certification to quantify those skills. And we're really focused on standardizing across our entire portfolio. So we now have the same learning paths and certifications and journeys on the Micro Focus side as we do on the traditional OpenText side. So it's been great. We've really finalized our integration and making one thing available to everyone.

Adapting to AI: The Learning Services Journey

Ajit: That's great. And also, I want to ask about this—since AI has come over, how are the learning services adapting? What's the new technologies becoming part of the curriculum?

Jillian: Yeah, so it's interesting. So I also have a development organization, so we develop all the content that we deliver or that gets delivered in e-learning or subscription format. So we've actually been on our own AI journey for about 4.5 years, and we've really tried to partner with folks in industry that want to collaborate. So we use AI for translation, text to speech, video editing, we use avatars, and we use it for content development. And then we use it in our adoption program. So when we go out and work with the customer to drive success in their organization and ensure the end users understand the ways of working in the tool, in their language and driving their outcomes, we'll also use those AI development tools to accelerate it. And then internally, obviously, the AI component, depending on product, it's just part of the curriculum.

Using OpenText Products: OTSM in Learning Management

Ajit: That's nice. And are you also using some OpenText products in learning services? Are you leveraging?

Jillian: I'm glad you asked. Yes, so in July we consolidated all of our content into a new learning management system. And we've got hands-on labs integrated, certification integrated, but the interesting thing is we needed to support this cloud solution for our employees, our customers, our partners. So we actually have OpenText Service Management Aviator embedded in there. I think Q1, we did like 3,000 tickets and as we start to scale it, we've got a small learning management solution admin team that supports our customers. So it's really cool when you see your own product in a product that we're driving out to market to support our customers and partners in getting skills.

Enabling Customer Success Through Skills

Ajit: That's awesome. And I also know you're part of the customer success organization as learning services. So how does your team enable those customer success journey?

Jillian: So we really have kind of two core audiences when we think about specifically our customers. Who are the people inside the customer that are responsible for solution success? Who's going to be the ones that are doing enablement, first line support, hands on technology? They need deep technical skills. Then are there partners in that account? Are they certified? Like, we want to make sure that we're working with partners that are heavily invested, and we have a lot of partners that are very dedicated to growing their practice and getting certified. And then the second really key audience is the users of the solution. Most projects, I'm going to guess, a solution success criteria is the adoption of that. So really asking, how are you going to onboard? How are you going to drive awareness? How are we going to fast track uptake and get faster time to value for those end users. So we have a whole user adoption area. My instructors who are really deeply technically skilled are also Prosci certified change managers and they work really closely with the customer to really understand what outcomes they're trying to drive, and then develop custom content and adoption strategies to support their solution in their language, in their context of the way that they work.

The Human Element in Technology Success

Ajit: That's awesome. You're enabling not just the customers, but the users in the AI era through learning services. You have to remember it's the people that matter, right?

Jillian: It can be the most wonderful solution, the best implementation, but if nobody understands it or understands why they're using it or how to use it, it's a miss for everybody.

Message to Customers

Ajit: If you have to give any message to your customers from learning services, what would it be?

Jillian: You know what, I think that one of the messages is we want your feedback. We survey all of our customers. We're constantly innovating, we're constantly trying to elevate, we're constantly investing in making learning that's engaging and really driving deep product knowledge so that they can be successful. So the feedback is really important to us. So that would be the one. Let's engage. Let's partner to get to the results we want.

Ajit: Yeah, we work together and we get creative.

Vision for 2030: Personalized Learning at Scale

Ajit: And I have to ask you this one question. So it's 2030 and you're in OpenText World and how different it's going to be? What innovations you can talk from a learning services? What do you see in your space, you see a lot of changes?

Jillian: Well, I think it's going to come a lot faster than 2030, but with agentic AI, I would see the fact that somebody goes in, they've got 20 minutes, they're an administrator, that they can just say, this is what I want to learn, and then it just gets created, very personalized and curated, might be delivered by a virtual avatar that is speaking in your direct language and knowledge at the point in time. So exactly when you need it, how you need it. But I think that's coming a lot faster than 2030.

Ajit: Yeah, I like that. I think you're seeing the pace of technology much faster because of the lens that you're using.

Closing

Ajit: Thank you so much, Jillian. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and share what you're doing. Your team is doing, enabling people with the learning that they need, and thank you so much for speaking. Thanks everyone. If you want to check more on learning services, please do. Look for it and I'd be happy to put a link below this video as well. I want to learn more about it, but thank you so much for tuning in and thank you, Jillian once again for coming.

Jillian: Thank you.

About OpenStudio

OpenStudio is OpenText’s media hub for thought leadership and innovation. This series explores stories of progress and success from industry experts, visionaries, and trailblazers. Our goal is to inspire, inform, and connect audiences with the people and ideas shaping the future of the digital world.

The post OpenText OpenStudio: Learning Services & Skills Enablement for the AI Era appeared first on OpenText Blogs.