Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional background, particularly focusing on your expertise in the industry?

I have over 24 years of experience in the document management industry, most of which I spent at Lexmark.

There, I evolved through several countries, Poland, France, and Switzerland, supporting sales and sales operations, building and managing sales programs, managing channel sales in several territories, and, in my last Lexmark role, managing business sales in the whole EMEA region.

Most recently, I worked with Zeendoc, setting up the branch in the UK, recruiting partners, building the sales pipeline, and converting opportunities with the team I did. I will continue recruiting for the office in Maidenhead and remote sales positions throughout the territory.

Q2. Which enterprise tech solutions are showing the highest net retention and upsell potential? And what are the latest innovations in these enterprise tech solutions?

The most potential I see in EDM software solutions is in the forefront of digitalization, where they are used by channel partners, replacing paper-based workflows of their customer workflows with intelligent digital workflow and storage in SME and VSE markets that are still the untapped territory in this segment.

Q3. How are hyperscalers differentiating their AI-native cloud offerings compared to emerging specialized players?

The future of the industry lies in native and local cloud providers, who are much more agile and less vulnerable to macroeconomic business and political/legislation trends.

Most of the fast-growing EDM and EDSM providers build their offers based on local and small providers rather than on Azure, AWS, and other hyperscaler offerings like Oracle, which target big, mostly multinational companies.

Q4. How vulnerable are green cloud initiatives to macroeconomic headwinds (e.g., energy crises and inflation driving up costs for renewable infrastructure investments)?

Sustainability is important for big companies building their offer on policy and legislation trends; SMEs and VSEs do not even ask themselves this question, prioritizing the overall cost of ownership and offering quality and pricing rather than its environmental impact.

Unless legislation helps move the needle, I do not see the market naturally evolving toward the green cloud in significant numbers.

This is why the growth potential in the current economy may be perceived as stagnating and not necessarily significant as long as the customer base or EDM and EDSM solutions providers decide to lead strategically with sustainability.

Q5. What are the key AI functionalities being embedded into next-gen EDMS platforms?

One of the most important features are instant learning and instant document recognition eliminating solution learning time.

Ready on the go from day one are key customer benefits of its implementation.

Q6. How are companies addressing concerns around AI hallucinations, model bias, and compliance?

Manual intervention can still eliminate AI hallucination and bias during the learning and usage process, so it is at the core of the process. This includes bugs like missing data entries, wrong qualification, and auto-routing errors.

Every solution tends to address them in different ways, but most of the good ones have options for checking and balancing alert implementation to rule out and correct them manually.

Q7. If you were an investor looking at companies within the space, what critical question would you pose to their senior management?

I would first look at the core of the solution design.

I would not look at overengineered products targeting enterprise markets with a relatively high number of users.  

I would look at solutions targeting high-growth VSE and SME markets that can be scaled up rather than products targeting the big enterprise market that need to be scaled down to fit the SME and VSEs market. In essence, a solution can accommodate the existing paper-based process or traditional file-sharing application-based processes rather than force enterprises of small and medium size to change their processes to accommodate the solution implementation.

Profit and revenue concerns are of secondary importance, and they largely depend these days on the product investment capex, which can be curated individually to fit P&L requirements.

Revenue per HC and other metrics that can be improved over time with proper market coverage segmentation would be of secondary importance.