We Didn’t Intend to Build an AI Company, But We Did

When we started Opus Guard, we weren’t chasing AI hype. In fact, we joked that we were building one of the least glamorous products in tech: a system to keep Confluence and Jira spaces tidy, compliant, and safe from risk. Legal, IT, and security teams loved it because it gave them confidence that old, outdated, or risky content wouldn’t come back to haunt them in litigation or audits.

It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t “AI.” But it was necessary. And it works really well.

Fast-forward a few years, and suddenly, AI isn’t just a novelty: it’s now a core part of how companies operate and move fast. Tools like Atlassian Rovo, Glean, and Salesforce Agentforce are transforming how teams onboard, sell, support customers, and even how executives keep tabs on what’s happening across the company.

• New hires no longer wait weeks for training: they can prompt an AI and instantly learn how the company works
• Sales and support teams can self-serve answers instead of digging through endless wiki pages
• Marketing teams can quickly author content, build and analyze campaigns, messaging, and market feedback in real-time to adjust faster
• Executives can quickly get clarity on projects without scheduling a dozen update meetings

But here’s the paradox: while executives are eager to deploy AI tools everywhere, too many organizations are falling short of the promised ROI because the foundation hasn’t been set. Without disciplined, good data governance: data classification, regularly cleaning, curating and retiring what no longer belongs, then those powerful AI tools end up amplifying noise instead of delivering signal.

One bad answer can cost millions in lost trust and revenue

AI has become the ultimate accelerator in nearly every role, especially those in revenue-forward teams like Sales and Marketing. But there’s one catch: it’s only as good as the content it’s fed. The stakes are high: even a single false or misleading answer from an AI tool can be enough to break trust. Once a team doubts the reliability of AI, they’re far less likely to keep using it, even though these tools are capable of driving dramatically higher ROI than traditional methods. 

This is where Opus Guard delivers tangible customer value: by keeping knowledge bases accurate and current, we ensure that Sales enablement materials, product facts, and messaging pulled into AI are far more accurate. The result is more reliable answers for prospects and customers, higher win rates, and a direct boost to revenue performance.

The dirty secret of AI in the enterprise

For years, bad and outdated content hid in plain sight because Confluence search was so terrible. If something was obsolete or inaccurate, odds were nobody would ever find it. That’s no longer the case.

AI changes the game. Now, every outdated, duplicate, or non-compliant page has a way of surfacing instantly. The very content that once hid in the shadows is now front and center in your AI’s context window.

If your spaces are messy, your AI answers will be messy too. In regulated industries, that’s not just frustrating, it’s risky. For example, an unintended piece of PII (like an employee’s home address buried in an old document) could suddenly surface in an AI response, or a long-expired certification claim could be echoed back to a customer as current. These seemingly small mistakes create outsized legal, compliance, and reputational risks. 

As we have previously shared, MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025 report confirms this: 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver meaningful ROI, and messy knowledge bases and improper workflows are a top reasons why. Without content discipline, even the most advanced AI tools can’t be trusted to deliver real value.

The AI shift we didn’t expect

This is where our story at Opus Guard comes full circle.

We didn’t set out to build an AI company. But by solving the “boring” problem of content retention, we built the foundation that makes enterprise AI actually work well.

Opus Guard’s Content Retention Manager isn’t just about compliance anymore. It’s about keeping the context window clean so AI tools deliver accurate, current, and safe results.

In other words:

• Without Opus Guard, AI suffers from garbage-in, garbage-out and low ROI
• With Opus Guard, AI transforms into a true ROI engine because you simply cannot have accurate, high-ROI, and successful AI deployments without a clean context window

The first step to AI success

At Opus Guard, we believe the real story isn’t just about the AI models. It’s about the hygiene of the data behind them. Our tools give companies the discipline and governance to make sure what flows into AI is trustworthy.

We didn’t intend to build an AI product. But it turns out, we built one of the most essential piece of the AI toolchain.

Opus Guard is your first step to AI success: keeping your AI context window clean.