Financial institutions have long treated employee communications as something to archive for regulators. During the Smarsh EDGE event, that archive was recast as aalyze a year of email, messages and AI-prompt traffic and turn it into business context. The catch is that AI is now one of the channels that must be captured, including agents communicating with other agents
The next phase will be defined by governance built into the foundation rather than bolted on. Customers are building their own agents outside compliance platforms and accessing that data through Model Context Protocol servers. Regulations remain technology-agnostic, however, and financial institutions remain liable for their agents’ actions. A study recently released by Smarsh Inc. found that only 26% of enterprises say their governance frameworks are keeping pace with AI deployment, even as AI in financial services moves beyond pilots.
“I think that move from system of record to system of engagement to system of intent, it’s really won or lost in one battleground, and that is data,” said Gemma Allen (pictured, left), host at theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “Data is a huge moat for companies in 2026.”
Allen spoke with industry experts during the Smarsh EDGE event in New York. The interviews covered communications intelligence, language models built for compliance, levels of agentic autonomy and the cloud partnerships supporting Smarsh’s platform. (* Disclosure below.)
Here are four standout insights from the event:
1. Communications intelligence turns unstructured messages into client context.
Smarsh is helping customers extract valuable insights from communications that were long too unstructured to use, according to Goutam Nadella, chief strategy officer of Smarsh. A customer relationship management system holds only what someone recorded about a meeting. AI can now classify a year of conversations across email, WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom and suggest how to prepare for the next one. Smarsh was a launch partner for the compliance application programming interfaces from Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC, capturing prompts so that risky outputs can be traced back to their sources. Governance must be foundational rather than episodic, Nadella added, pointing to the billions of dollars in regulatory fines imposed on financial institutions for failing to preserve business communications conducted through WhatsApp and other messaging platforms.
Watch the full interview from theCUBE.
2. Natural-language questions replace Boolean searches for compliance supervisors.
Supervisors who once ran complex Boolean searches to find market manipulation can now ask an agent questions in plain language and receive flagged conversations with risk scores, explained Rohit Khanna, chief customer officer of Smarsh. A context layer that maps identity hierarchies, for which Smarsh has filed a patent, helps prevent the AI from generating false positives. The company also builds compliance language models that are cheaper to run than large language models, including a multilingual model that tracks speakers switching between languages. Its S-Combinator innovation group of 11 volunteers built a model risk management agent that is now in limited availability. Governance must come first, Khanna added.
Check out the full segment on theCUBE.
3. Agentic automation scales with the risk of each workflow.
Organizations can combine Smarsh’s agents with their own models and agents, while the platform provides underlying governance, data access controls and explainability underneath, noted Kamesh Tumsi, chief product officer of Smarsh. The company has launched four or five agents in six months alongside its new MCP server. Because 70% to 80% of compliance spending still goes toward labor, the potential return from AI is significant, according to Tumsi. He described four levels of autonomy: assisting, recommending, executing under guardrails and fully autonomous. Each process is matched to a level by weighing whether it is reversible, how complex it is and how much observability it requires.
See theCUBE’s full coverage.
4. AWS and Caylent help build governance into the infrastructure layer.
Customer anxiety about AI a year ago has turned into excitement now that the infrastructure exists, according to Nadella, who appeared with Arym Diamond, head of data and AI go-to-market sales at Amazon Web Services Inc., and Peter Sankauskas (pictured, right), portfolio chief technology officer of Caylent Inc., during a panel interview. Through a multiyear strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, Smarsh is building governance and security in at the infrastructure layer, because customers now want to know who or what is accessing their data. Smarsh has shifted from a system of record to a system of engagement built on AWS, explained Diamond. AI needs a balance: authority without context produces slop, and context without authority leaves teams babysitting it, added Sankauskas.
Catch the full conversation on theCUBE.
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Smarsh EDGE. Neither Smarsh, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
Photo: SiliconANGLE
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network
Are you an AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE financially by buying your AWS services from ourMarketplace portal page and links:https://siliconangle.com/aws-marketplace/
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
