From comms compliance to communications intelligence

Key points

Key takeaways from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts interview with Smarsh CEO Kim Crawford Goodman (October 2026):

AI lit up across the platform. Smarsh has applied AI across capture, archiving and surveillance: it now ingests email, text, voice and video alongside AI channels such as Amazon Bedrock, Google Workspace and Anthropic’s Claude for enterprise, so regulated clients can monitor what goes into and comes out of their AI tools.

Scale advantage. Goodman describes Smarsh as the largest company in communications data and intelligence, more than twice the size of its nearest competitor, with R&D budgets “multiples” of rivals — enabling deeper investment in the full compliance workflow and beyond.

Agents working the data. A suite of agents now operates on the platform, including a discovery agent for investigations and legal work that builds a context graph of who communicated with whom, and Ask Smarsh, which lets employees query their own communications data in natural language.

MCP as an opening. Since its April appearance, Smarsh has launched an MCP server so customers’ own agents can reach its platform, data and agents — Goodman expects clients to combine large language models, open-source models and Smarsh’s own small language model, refined over a decade on communications data.

Cutting false positives. AI-driven surveillance cuts false positives by 70–80%, letting compliance teams focus resources on real risk instead of searching the “haystack” — a pattern that has historically cost the industry billions of dollars in fines for un-captured WhatsApp, WeChat and Signal traffic.

Beyond compliance. The same pristine data is expanding into government (freedom-of-information requests), healthcare privacy, pharma and CRM-driven revenue analysis; a voice-capture acquisition in early 2025 adds voice and video to the searchable archive.

Competitive picture. Traditional rivals are “a fraction of our size” and new AI-native entrants lack the depth beneath the demo — Goodman likens the moat to an iceberg, contrasting Smarsh with broad providers such as Microsoft.

Preserving the truth. With clients including 18 of the 20 largest financial institutions outside mainland China, Smarsh’s stated mission is to “preserve and protect the truth” — attributable communications data becomes more critical as AI multiplies what is asserted but not verified.

Read more: theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts