Smarsh's Goutam Nadella on communications intelligence

Key points

Key takeaways from the theCUBE interview at Smarsh EDGE 2026 with Smarsh chief strategy officer Goutam Nadella (October 2026):

Strategy focus. Recently moved from product to strategy, Nadella is focused on evolving the company to keep delivering for customers over the next five years rather than six to twelve months, spending much of his time with customers and partners including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and AWS.

Two common problems. Customers consistently ask about efficiency — doing more with the same people — and about extracting context from communications, which Nadella calls the nervous system of a company: unstructured communications have historically been untapped because they are hard to analyse.

Systems of opportunity. Static CRM data only records what people logged; combining it with dynamic communications signals (WhatsApp, email, Teams, Zoom) lets a CRO traverse a year of conversations, classify them and prepare for the next meeting — moving from systems of record toward systems of opportunity.

The WhatsApp challenge. End-to-end encryption makes it genuinely hard to capture compliantly while preserving the employee experience — presence, contacts, muscle memory — and Nadella notes Wall Street has paid over a billion dollars in fines for un-captured WhatsApp behaviour, a pattern that repeats until compliance is built in.

Frontier-lab partnerships. Smarsh was a launch partner for Anthropic's and OpenAI's compliance APIs, capturing prompts so AI usage inside firms can be traced back to what actually happened, and has launched an MCP server (via Anthropic) so customers' agents can interrogate communications data wherever the workflow happens.

Governance must be foundational. The lesson from WhatsApp fines is that compliance built on as an afterthought fails; capture, analysis and AI should be applied to any tool producing meaningful business context — email, Teams, Zoom, mobile and AI tools alike.

Cyber convergence. The CISO is a primary stakeholder and cybersecurity is integral to the roadmap: AI creates new risk, exploited faster by attackers, but can also be used to prevent and catch threats, an opportunity Smarsh and customers are pursuing with industry working groups.

Read more: theCUBE on YouTube