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You.
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Hello and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I'm your host, Shane o', Neill, freelance writer and consultant and former managing editor of CIO.com before I introduce today's guest, I'd like to quickly mention our sponsor. Sponsoring today's episode is Highland. Highland empowers organizations with unified content, process and application intelligence solutions, unlocking profound insights that fuel innovation. Trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, including many of the Fortune 100, Highland's solutions fundamentally redefine how teams operate and engage with those they serve. For additional information on the Highland platform and services, please visit highland.com okay, so joining me for today's show is Tim McIntyre, the chief technology Officer at Highland. Highland is both a sponsor and a guest today. As cto, Tim leads Highland's global engineering initiatives to deliver innovative solutions and seamless experiences across the company's portfolio. A passionate technologist and seasoned engineering leader, Tim brings over two decades of experience building and scaling platforms and his leadership is instrumental in shaping the future of Highland's platform as he continues to push the boundaries of cloud innovation and AI powered content intelligence. A Little Bit More on Highland Founded in 1991, Highland is an enterprise software company headquartered in Westlake, Ohio. With 4,000 employees and more than 16,000 customers globally, Highland makes it easier for large organizations to store, find and share documents, automate approvals and stay compliant. Its platforms also connect with other business systems and use artificial intelligence to pull insights from unstructured data. Tim joined Hyland earlier this year as cto. Prior to joining the company, Tim was the co founder of Stackiq, a company acquired by Teradata. At Teradata, he most recently served as Senior Vice President of Product Engineering, leading a vast engineering organization dedicated to delivering enterprise data and analytics at scale. Tim, welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.
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Hey Shane, how you doing? Thanks for the kind intro and loved hearing the background on Highland.
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My pleasure. So I'd like to start things off with sort of a general question about the enterprise content management space. Kind of a 30,000 foot view. What are some of the main big picture content management data management challenges for high Highland's customers and Highland as a business that have been bubbling up over the past few years.
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Yeah, well that play on words there kind of lines up with a lot of what we do. Hybrid infrastructure is very important to the Highland story, But from a 30,000 foot view, AI adoption, especially around unstructured content, really reshaping how enterprises think about data. You know we've seen so much change over the past three to five years in how enterprise organizations can leverage AI to unlock value within their companies. But really over the past few years, most of that value has been driven from models that are trained on public data. So to be able to use enterprise content management data specific to your organization, unlocking value from siloed content and combining that with the value being driven today by enterprise AI tools, that's the big picture for us. And that's what we really see every cio, every large enterprise thinking about how do I combine this massive change in the industry through access to generative AI with the value that the companies keep within their organization that are specific to them.
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Okay, so this, so, so that's this interesting setup. So this next question is a bit of a self evaluation question, I guess. I know you've, you've been CTO at Highland for six months around that, right? It was earlier this year that you started that started your role. Maybe you can discuss what your marching orders were from the C suite coming into the role you mentioned. I would say cloud innovation is important at Highland. Also the use of artificial intelligence, AI agents. You just made an announcement about that. But what were your marching orders, for lack of a better word? And how have you and your team been progressing so far this year?
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Yeah, Hylim is. And many of our customers were already pretty far down the path of cloud adoption. When I stepped into the CTO role, the mandate was clear. It was continue down that path and focus on the value that we can deliver our customers through AI solutions and what we call content innovation cloud. So content innovation cloud adds a layer on top of our customers data that they have under management today in an ECM platform, often an ECM platform from Highland, OnBase, Nuxio, Alfresco, or a third party platform. And being able to access that data through a federated model and then drive value through AI on top of that data with content innovation Cloud was my clear mandate when I started. And what was cool about starting the role is, you know, Hyland really went through a massive sea change over the past 12 to 18 months before I joined. There was a good year, two years of rapid discovery and innovation that was done at the company to start delivering services in content innovation cloud. So I was able to join the company where we had already hit the ground running. We are delivering new value to our ECM customers through AI and now we're doubling down on that in lots of interesting ways that we can get into through this discussion.
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Great, great. Well, switching gears slightly, we can talk about your, your announcements about about agentic AI and the open sourcing of your content repository. But I want to talk before that I wanted to talk about talent and staffing. As an executive, can you tell me about the size and the scope of your technology team and how you've structured it to deliver value to the rest of the organization through your team?
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Yeah. So we have a global team of engineers, architects, product leaders. Similar size and scale to organizations I've worked with in the past, such as, such as Teradata. And Highland's really grown up in interesting ways. Highland's made a number of acquisitions in the space over the previous years, bringing in teams from Alfresco, Nuxio, Perceptive that are all part of the enterprise content management portfolio that we support today. Now it's created this really interesting global workforce with really a diverse set of skills. The biggest challenge today, I think for any CTO or CIO is the market's incredibly competitive for hiring talent in the AI ML and analytics space. And we found that global reach has been incredibly helpful. Global reach and enabling our team of engineers to leverage their experience in traditional analytics for enterprise content management at scale and transitioning that work with the tool chain that's available today in the generative AI space. And we align our teams around customer outcomes. We're a products company, but we think about how our products lead to outcomes, how our products lead to industry solutions or vertical solutions. So having that team with deep industry expertise and understanding how an AI driven outcome would apply to healthcare financial services. The education space is also super important.
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So they do align with the verticals that you. That. That Highland serves.
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It's a combination. So we sell a platform of enterprise content management solutions and CIC is a platform that delivers value along the AI and agentic AI tool chain. But then within that group, within that organization, there are groups that focus on specific industry verticals.
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Okay, interesting. Can you talk a little bit about talent retention and acquisition strategies? I think this is always on the top of the mind of any executive who has to run teams and execute technologies. Can you talk a little bit about Highland's hiring process and also maybe the work from home, hybrid work models and evaluating performance, things of that nature.
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Yeah, we embrace hybrid work and that's been really important for both talent acquisition and talent retention. We've been able to be incredibly efficient and effective hiring folks all over the globe and having distributed teams. We still have a very large presence in Ohio where the company grew up and have great relationships with local universities and the community there. But being able to combine that with engineering teams in the EU that mostly came through previous acquisitions. We have a very strong workforce in India and I don't think of India as a low cost development region. There are incredible developers both in the AI space, analytics content management space where we partner closely between our US EU and India teams to develop value and then providing flexibility through that hybrid model for, you know, a lot of folks have relocated over the kind of post Covid years and being able to retain that talent and have them continue to contribute on work they're passionate about from a new location has also been super, super helpful.
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That's great. Yeah. A far flung teams is that. That's just the nature of being a global company now. Yeah, we're thinking about where we are in the year right now. I know we're in Q4, so thinking about the rest of the year into 2026, what are your priorities? What's on your priorities list as a cto? And before you answer that, I want to mention that Hyland just made a couple announcements about open sourcing its cloud content repository and also expanding the use of agentic AI in its products. So can you talk about those initiatives and some of your other priorities for the rest of the year and into next year?
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Yeah, absolutely. We just came out of our community event Community Live. It was my first one with the company out in Las Vegas and now we're holding EU version of the event next week out in Munich. So I'm excited to go out and meet some of our customers in the EU as well. But in those events we're talking a lot about 2026 priorities and what's next for Content innovation Cloud. So first it's scaling the existing platform. We've recently released Intelligent Document Processing, Content Enrichment, Knowledge Enrichment, and following Community Live, we laid out the strategy for building an enterprise Agent Mesh and Enterprise Context engine inside of our Content Innovation cloud. And those are the key things that we see our customers adopting in 2026 that will unlock value for from the unstructured data that they've currently had under management and give them a platform to build agents that are specific to their workflows. You know, we're seeing a lot of companies start to build off the shelf agents or agents using publicly available models. But being able to combine this enterprise context engine with an agent mesh where you're taking the automated workflows, you're taking metadata specific to your enterprise, you're taking structured and unstructured content that you've been managing over years and not driving value from that content for how you manage your enterprise or your organization. All that comes together with a combination of our enterprise context engine and agent mesh inside Content Innovation Cloud. We're super excited about the next year. We have real world customer use cases that we're going to be talking a lot about as we go into Community Live 2026.
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Interesting. So Tim, can you give me an example of how one of your customers would use an AI agent to collect data and make sense of it and be able to do their job quicker and more efficiently?
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Yeah. So in most enterprise content management solutions, there is already some level of workflow automation. Setting up that workflow automation, first of all, is hard. There's a long time to value. Second, there's still a lot of manual process in figuring out how mortgage application, for instance, maps to a given business process. With agents, you can build a workflow using foundation models from publicly available models, combining those models with enterprise specific data to create an agent that can take you through both the ingest of a mortgage application, the text recognition of that mortgage application, and then intelligently make decisions on the risk associated with that application and then whether or not a human needs to be involved in that workflow. So a lot of the questions we get, you know, when we add an agent to a given workflow, are we taking away jobs? We don't really see it that way, both in the real world or moving forward. We're allowing our customers and their employees to uplevel the value that they're creating for their business. So if we can only flag human in the loop on 5% of mortgage applications that come through, the human that ends up as a part of that process can do a real risk analysis. You know, they don't have 100 documents coming across their desk each day. They can take the ones with the highest risk profile and then spend more time making intelligent decisions on how to to proceed with a given workflow. So that's the mortgage application example, but there are a thousand others that are industry specific.
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Right? Right. No, that's a great example. It's about using AI to save time and do your work more efficiently. We're all kind of doing it in our own way. I know I do it as a writer and as a consultant and it goes all on down the line in every industry and every role. And that's a good segue. To my next question, AI is certainly on everyone's mind. As a technologist, I'm sure you're always looking ahead. We're all looking ahead at AI. But so, so what you can include AI in this, of course, but which emerging tech trends are you keeping an eye on now and trying to stay ahead of?
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So AI is obviously a huge one. I know we've spent most of our time speaking about AI so far, but you know, it's the combination of AI, open data access and federated data. You know, AI can only drive, you know, so much value without great access to open data sets and enterprise specific data sets. So this notion in content innovation cloud, where we're enabling federated access to existing data sources, is something that's unique in the, the industry. We see people coming across the problem from a number of different, you know, angles, both traditional ECM players and the larger players in the generative AI space. But that unique value proposition of being able to access data through a federated content mechanism, combining that data with publicly available data sets, you know, you're seeing this in the enterprise data warehouse space already. Companies like Snowflake Databricks, you know, Teradata, you know, a big part of the shift that's happened in that space over the previous years have been open table formats, open access to data, data sharing. Now we're starting to see the same thing being super important in the unstructured content and data space.
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Yeah, that's, that's great. That's a, those are some key technologies, data integration and AI, making it all easier and more accessible.
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Well, making that data more accessible to AI, you know, that's, you know, how we're hydrating the value that we get out of AI.
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Right, right, right. AI without data is pretty useless, right?
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That's right, that's right. Or AI with, you know, that's hydrated only with somebody else's data is, is not nearly as valuable as AI hydrated by your data.
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Right, right on, right on. Okay, one more question, Tim, and this is another sort of self evaluation question. It's not necessarily related to technology, but more leadership. As a cto, what have you learned about your own leadership style in the last year or two that you can pass on to your peers?
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You know, I'm having a lot of fun. I still consider myself a startup guy and, you know, before I ended up spending eight years at Teradata, having a lot of fun there and expect to have a similar long run at Highland. But the biggest lesson I've learned is, you know, take that startup mentality and startup experience into every role that I've had. You know, whether you're building a small startup from scratch or managing a global engineering organization and a company with thousand employees, thousands of employees, you still got to keep that startup mindset, got to be adaptable. Rapid discovery, rapid innovation, those are the key for every technology company to be successful. And you know, you can't lose that when you scale. You got to treat every company like a startup. You've got to treat every quarter as a quarter where you can develop something new that's going to change the given industry and you're working in. And that's, that's why I still have fun doing my job. I get to wear a lot of different hats, work with a lot of interesting people and just, just love innovating. It's, it's super fun.
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Great. Great.
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Yeah.
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Keep the startup spirit alive. I think that's a good, a good note to end on. Well, thank you very much, Tim. Thanks a lot. I've learned a lot about, you know, island and your team's accomplishments so far. I wish you the best in the rest of the year and into the new year and beyond. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
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You too, Shane. Thanks so much.
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I would also like to thank our audience for tuning in. If you'd like to listen to or watch this episode again, you can find it on CIO.com, the CIO YouTube channel, and wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tim McIntyre, CTO of Highland. To be sure you don't miss any of our future shows, take a moment to subscribe to CIO's YouTube channel. We hope you'll join us next time. Thanks again for tuning in.