Q & A with Isabelle Mauny, Field CTO, WSO2, on helping organisations unlock the true potential of open, responsible AI.

What excites you most about this year’ s Oxygenate theme – AI Meets Open-Source?

AI is a major focus for our customers, and we’ re helping enterprises move beyond experimentation toward real, value-driven solutions. Integrating AI across our offerings has fundamentally transformed our open-source products. I’ m particularly excited about the insights, demonstrations and showcases we’ ll present this year, which will illustrate how AI is reshaping what’ s possible in the opensource landscape.

The key questions become: How do we safeguard data? How do we prevent misuse? AI models are built to help, but that also makes them vulnerable to manipulation. We expect a shift toward localised LLM deployments – domain-specific models trained on private data with restricted access.

However, decentralisation brings a new challenge: the proliferation of models requiring proper governance. Enterprises need visibility and control – who uses which model, what requests are made, and how much consumption occurs.

Where does AI genuinely add value to enterprises?

The most immediate value lies in productivity. Developers are already under significant time pressure, so even a 10 – 20 % gain in efficiency represents meaningful progress – time they can reinvest in higher-value work. The second dimension is the rise of agentic AI. Businesses can now create entirely new ways for users to interact with systems through AI agents and natural language interfaces. Conceivably, we may move beyond traditional mobile apps to a single intelligent interface that can answer questions and take action.

They must also prevent employees from using AI for personal queries. These realities highlight the urgency of establishing governance frameworks now, rather than repeating past mistakes.

As Field CTO, what recurring challenge are customers raising?

The biggest challenge is staying competitive. There’ s less need for hard selling – most enterprises already want AI. The shift is from us asking,“ How can we help you?” to them asking,“ How can you help me?”

This shift will transform how we work and how enterprises think about customer experience. Today, most value is still in productivity, as we strengthen foundational elements – reliable architectures, strong guardrails and trustworthy frameworks – for agentic AI to operate safely and effectively.

How do you see governance, trust and security evolving in the open-source landscape?

The challenge often lies not with developers, but with non-technical users – people in HR, legal or other functions – who now use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to summarise documents or create presentations. Ironically, these are individuals who would never share sensitive information with another person yet feel comfortable uploading it to an AI system. We must therefore assume that everything shared could be analysed and stored somewhere.

At a recent Oxygenate event in Italy, several participants voiced this concern. They see competitors launching AI initiatives and know they must respond but often don’ t know where to start. That uncertainty is widespread across industries.

Looking ahead, what are you prioritising at WSO2?

We’ re investing heavily in agentic AI assistants – intelligent companions that help developers maintain high-quality, secure code, APIs and configurations while automating tasks. This also accelerates onboarding for new customers.

A major milestone is WSO2’ s acquisition of Moesif, an analytics and monetisation platform that unifies partner data into a single sales interface, offering powerful insights and growth opportunities.

Customer support remains another focus: around 20 % of our support queries are now resolved automatically by AI agents with high satisfaction. These aren’ t front-line product issues, but they significantly improve efficiency and responsiveness. p

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