Sinan Eren, Co-founder and CEO at Opnova in this Q&A shares more about their new agentic AI solution, the impact of AI in ITSM workflows and more:

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Hi Sinan, tell us about yourself and more about your time in the B2B IT market?

I have been active in the cybersecurity space for more than 20 years, selling to large enterprise and SME partners. Whether directly or indirectly through MSP, reseller and system integration partners, I have worked closely with IT business leaders to mitigate risks, reduce costs, increase productivity with enablement and streamline operations.

We’d love to hear about Opnova’s platform and how it enables IT teams?

Opnova is an AI-native platform that performs human-level operations tasks within existing IT workflows, enabling automation where it was previously not practical or possible.

We are a venture-backed startup founded by successful serial entrepreneurs who are veteran practitioners from enterprise security, IT, and AI research organizations. We aim to reduce “rework” in enterprise IT operations, enabling a new level of operational efficiency, productivity, and risk mitigation for the organizations we work with.  Examples of processes ripe for this kind of reduction include employee lifecycle management (movers, joiners, leavers), application access requests/approvals, compliance reviews, and common troubleshooting service requests (password resets, porting MFA, etc.).

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Can you throw light on your new agentic AI solution and how it will help change the game for IT teams?

Our agentic AI approach goes beyond traditional rule-based automation. Unlike predefined scripts, our platform can perceive its environment, adapt to it, make decisions, and take actions to accomplish tasks. Think of it as an autonomous taxi navigating a bustling city, compared to traditional automation’s fixed-track train. This adaptability allows agentic AI to handle complex, dynamic environments where conventional automation falters.

Our AI is designed to enhance and amplify the capabilities of professionals in enterprise IT, security, and compliance operations, not replace them. We believe the future of enterprise automation lies in this seamless collaboration, where AI augments professional expertise to achieve outcomes that surpass what either could accomplish alone.

What about today’s state of IT management needs a complete overhaul and how are you seeing AI play a key role here today?

I wouldn’t call for a complete overhaul but perhaps an attempt to close the gaps with an eye towards improving organizational efficiency. CIOs and IT leaders operate under a long list of mandates competing for attention and budget. I recognize that and genuinely empathize with these leaders. My suggestion would be to use AI to close the gaps in their existing IT service management implementation. I have always been an advocate of “better together” over “rip and replace.”

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Can you talk about some leading tech brands that have balanced IT service management cycles across all areas and what key learnings we can grab from them?

While I can’t name names, I can share that I have run into brands, most typically later-stage tech companies, where a lot of the IT service management cycles are automated and put behind self-service interfaces like forms and chatbots. Even then some of these highly automated environments had gaps in their coverage due to limitations imposed on them by third-party vendors, like not being able to reassign licenses to a user from a departing one on an enterprise SaaS subscription.  Most likely these vendors did not want to expose license management to their customers, so that had to be done manually by the service desk.

As far as lessons learned, I found one common strong trait in these tech brands: their strong knowledge base and ample documentation prior to attempting to automate an IT workflow. I found that to be an amazing investment by these teams and a great catalyst to get things right at first try.

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