In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
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Kim Crawford Goodman, Smarsh
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here at our New York Stock Exchange CUBE Studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Mixture of Expert Series. We bring in experts to talk about what's going on in their world, but also sharing their view on this new world we're moving into. Obviously, AI infrastructure's the hottest category. It's impacting all of our domains, all verticals, all parts of our life. Kim is here, Kim Crawford Goodman, CEO of Smarsh is here at theCUBE. Thanks for coming in. Good to see you.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Thank you very much for having me, John. It's a delight to be here.
John Furrier
>> I want to get into Smarsh, but we were talking before we came on camera about our previous endeavors in our life going back to the early days of the computer industry. And we both kind of cut our teeth into kind of like the basic building blocks when we had to build everything ourselves. And it really was the rise of a revolution. I mean, the computer revolution in the '80s, '90s was essentially a bunch of missionaries and mercenaries working together to create high-performance computing from proprietary to open. And you had a systems revolution, you had an open source software revolution. Of course, that fueled the internet, web, then cloud. And here we are with AI built on top of all those first principles. How do you explain that to people when you say, "Hey, we've seen this movie before?" You've seen many waves. How do you describe the impact of the AI wave that we're living on? Because it's a full stack, we see vertical integration discussions, we see horizontal scale. How do you make sense of it when you talk to people?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, thank you for the question. I am a Stanford-trained engineer, and I have been a technologist and an executive in technology now for a few decades. And the first thing I tell people is there are just constant waves of transition in technology. And there's no need to be fearful of any of them because we've seen many of them, we've transversed many of them, and we've made business and we've made people's lives better as a result of it. And I, frankly, age myself a bit, but I go all the way back to I went to college with a typewriter and I left college with a personal computer. I worked at Dell when things were moving. I worked at IBM, actually, as an intern, in the mainframe age, and then I eventually worked at Dell where mainframes went to servers. Now, I lead a company called Smarsh, which is a AI-first company and is a public cloud-first company. So all of these things that I have managed before, delivered before are now sitting in the public cloud and we have very close relationships with cloud providers. So, I could go on and on. I could talk about how we went from the personal computer to the mobile phone and how vital the mobile phone is. The AI transition, though, I tell people is another transition. We don't need to be afraid of it, but we need to be a part of it, but it is likely the biggest one we will see in our lifetime.
John Furrier
>> You know, John Chambers, CUBE alumni, I've follow his career since his early Cisco days. He had a quote that I always talk about. "You win in transitions." Companies win in transitions. Telecom is another great example. All this talk about, "Oh my God, the CapEx numbers are so big on this AI infrastructure." But if you look at just the 5G rollout expense, if you actually look at the entire telco numbers, towers, radios, backhaul, all the facilities, the footprints, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. So it seems like we're just scratching the surface when you think about what the demand is for AI because if you can become a native citizen of the wave, you said cloud-first and AI-first, that's an opportunity.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well-
John Furrier
>> Share your thoughts around this because business leaders trying, "What's the right architecture? It's moving so fast. How do I do that?" It's execution risk.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, the quote that "You win in transitions" is exactly right. And we can see this right now in the market and in the valuations. Everyone is trying to figure out the SaaS software space. And if anything, they've been pretty harsh on it from an investment standpoint. As someone who leads a leading-edge AI and SaaS company is completely clear to me what's happening. We're in a transition and the software companies that win in AI align to their underlying technology, align to, if they're fortunate like Smarsh, their underlying database. Those are the ones that are going to be the leaders in the future, but some people will not do that, and those are the ones that will fall away in the future.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. The-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> -
John Furrier
>> The SaaSpocalypse that happened last month or whenever it was when the valuations changed, there's a lot of debate. I mean, I was kind of not on that bandwagon, but I did make the comment, "Bad software always goes away." So if software as a service transitions to AI-native, it's just a new kind of thing. It's not the same thing. So you can't be the same thing in a new market. So you're seeing things like the iPhone's not an iPod. It's an iPod, but it's an iPod and a computer and it's an Apple store and vertically integrated. So that's just a innovator's dilemma.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> And what's going to happen is what we've seen in every transition, which is there will be some new-
John Furrier
>> Yeah....
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> some new people that embrace the new technology, all new ways that will become relevant, but there will also be software companies, technology companies who combine the data they have, the knowledge they have, the skill they have, combine that and adopt the new technologies and principles, and they will also get bigger and stronger. And as a CEO of a software company that has been in AI for quite a long time, this is how you move, this is how you drive, this is how you help your company and your clients be successful.
John Furrier
>> I think the whole valuation shift around the thread of AI has more of a Wall Street lack of information on where the value creation is shifting. I want to get into agents, but first let's talk about Smarsh. Set the table for the folks that don't know what the company's doing and so what its mission is, what it's about. Do a quick plug for Smarsh, your mission, North Star, value proposition, and momentum.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Quite frankly, Smarsh is a tremendous company and more people should know about it. What we do is we work typically with regulated companies. Our most prominent customers tend to be banks, investment houses, et cetera. And we help them with their communications data and the intelligence around it. They primarily do it for, I'd say, the last 10, 20 years, for compliance reasons. They're required to keep all of the emails, text messages, all the communications between-
John Furrier
>> They have to hoard the data....
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> between investment managers, and they're required to keep it for a good reason because they've got to keep it in pure form and they've got to then crawl that data looking for bad behavior. People figured out many, many years ago that when the LIBOR scandal happened, if someone had just been watching what those folks were saying to each other, we could have prevented the entire scandal, and frankly, we could have saved tens of billions of dollars of losses. So what we do at Smarsh is we help our clients with all of this, but as a result of that, and we are the largest and most strategic in our industry, as a result of that, we are experts at the data that is communications data. In fact, we at Smarsh have the second-largest repository of communications data only behind Microsoft. But what we're really expert at is the AI to crawl it, to help our clients and help the industry be protected and find problems. Now what we're seeing is the data so valuable and the ability to crawl it is so valuable, you can do many other valuable things with it.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting. Data storage, we heard rumblings around GDPR back in the day, a lot of privacy, but what you're getting at is by having good data hygiene on the storage side, that's just kind of like you got to check the boxes. But now in the age of AI, it eats up data super fast. We're seeing all the value proposition, retrieval search, RAG. You're seeing now reasoning coming in. Multimodal models can come through that corpus of data and turn data hoarding into an asset.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, you said the key word. We actually at Smarsh just published last month, anyone can go download it, the Smarsh AI Insights Report, to give people some perspectives on the trends that we see in our area of communications, intelligence, and data. And one of those key trends is turning an archive, which people thought as just, "Oh, I need to have it, I have it for security," turning it into an asset because the data itself is well-organized, it's well-indexed, it's verified to be accurate. We at Smarsh say that we preserve and we protect the truth, and that's an important thing to do. And now, you can use that data not just for risk protection and compliance, you can use that data to enliven your CRM.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. It really is a data high strategy because the old model, the way I observed, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like, "Okay, we got to store all this stuff, put it on some storage . Where is it? Which country is it in?" Just to find it, if something happened, they'd have to hire a firm to come in, peel through everything, peel the onion back. Now you have all that data, but it's also tied to workflows and it's tied to well-known domain-specific things. This is the secret sauce of the agent world we're living in right now, which is the winner is coming out of the agent wave is can they get access to the data? Can AI interrogate it, ingest it, organize it, make it an asset, which is like insights, reports and other things? But also then the next one is, okay, this is the workflow. So this is humans doing a job. So now you've got almost the trifecta. Share your vision on that and how you see Smarsh doing that because you're coming in from a, "Hey, we're going to make you sleep easy at night and give you comfort in anything you need with your data." But now, you're actually turning it into a net-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Absolutely....
John Furrier
>> net positive-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Absolutely....
John Furrier
>> now because you've got workflows.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yes. What we see is, in fact, one of the other trends that we see is the people who manage this data are becoming orchestrators, not just managers of data. So you are absolutely right. It starts with the data itself being high quality. There's a statistic out there that 90% of the data we have can't be used for AI because it's not structured properly, it's not indexed properly. So we clean that up and solve that for our clients over the last couple of decades. And you are absolutely right that one of the ways it comes alive is we are now applying agents to crawl that data, and those agents can then modernize and make far more efficient workflows. So we see the automation of many, many workflows tied to... it will be tied to different sets of data, but very closely tied to the dataset we hold for our calls.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. There's an expression that we've been hearing on theCUBE, and we've even said it ourselves, "AI is only as good as what it can see." That's data. If you look at things we're seeing now on some of the model innovations, security is super hot. Claude just put out the new security model. That's finding exploits that are like 20 years old, zero-days that are 20 years old. Like, "Wait a minute, there's been a zero-day exploit waiting to be unlocked that's been sitting there for 20 years." So you can see the efficiencies. Is this scaring people or is this a strategic imperative to move faster? And this is your world, this is you live this every day.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. I will tell you, just this week I spent time with multiple clients. We had our largest client show ever, actually, in New York a couple days ago. And I will tell you, people are moving. And even though AI is new and what you can do with it, automating workflows is new and everybody has to learn new tools and techniques, everybody knows they must do it because what's happening is you have to embrace AI in your base business.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> And if you don't figure out how to embrace it in your base business, someone else is going to. So they're looking for best-in-class partners with the right agents, the right AI, the right teams, the right data, the right capability to help them move forward.
John Furrier
>> I think you said it right. And I think you bring up a good point. This is something that we're seeing in our coverage and our research is this year the AI is not a strategy risk because you just said it. Everyone knows you got to get it done because it's clear. If you don't, you're going to be driftwood if you don't miss this wave right. The question that comes up is execution risk. You're seeing the C-suite, CEOs and the staff, CFO, CSO, CIO, chief people officer really starting to have to act differently amongst each other as teammates because they have to be a teamwork and partnership because if I'm going to have tokens giving out to employees, they're going to have workers and agents. That's an HR issue. They're going to have finance. I say, "How do I value these tokens? Who pays for them?" So you now have kind of like the corporate organizational thinking around it.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well-
John Furrier
>> As CEO, I'm sure this is on your plate, how are you thinking about your broader organization to affect that change?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, again, what we see both inside as well as with our clients who we work closely with is the proper use of AI for greater effectiveness and efficiency will evolve the organization. It's going to evolve it in a few ways. Number one, you can't just worry about the AI. You've also got to worry about the governance of it. In some cases, what we're seeing is the AI is moving faster than your ability to control it, manage it, govern it, et cetera. Number two, we see to take advantage of it, you've got to work across organizations very effectively. I'll use a perfect example. Inside our own organization, we're applying a brand new leading-edge, cutting-edge tool to help us manage across our top 50 accounts. That's not just a tool for sales. That's a tool for our service organization. That's a tool for our executives. That's a tool for our engineers to understand what it is our clients need. So yes, the level of integration and collaboration is going to go to the next level if you want to win in AI.
John Furrier
>> There's so many data sources, a lot of channels of data, a lot of databases. You mentioned tools. As CEO, you're going through organizational change. Every CEO, every C-suite executive I talk to all say the same thing. "We understand what has to get done. we see horizontal scale and all those data challenges," but the question becomes , "Okay, how do I manage my people? So when you have these transitions, which we talked about at the top, you win in there. If the tooling's changing for the human, executive and then the staff below, if you don't evolve with the tools, you'll be replaced by someone who will. Whether you're building homes, a new saw comes out that's, "Oh, electric saw, that's better than the manual saw. You go faster." So the tooling really drives it. As the CEO, how do you communicate that to your staff and your team? Do you say, "Look, we have to adopt the new tools?" And are your customers in lockstep with that and how do those conversations happen? Because this is something that's really not talked about much. Is the tooling adoption impacting the role of the executive, the role of the staff worker and the role of the employees?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. I will tell you, as a CEO, to drive AI transformation, it has to be hit and driven from every single angle. So what do I mean by that? I mean, when I put out my three-year strategy, being a great AI-first company is prominent in that strategy. When you put out your annual goals, everybody moving and using multiple AI tools is in those goals. Leadership is always the key thing. When I think about the leaders that report to me and that report another level below that, those leaders have to actually embody a sense of urgency and a sense of excellence as it relates to AI. You have to find the funding for the tools, which is not always easy, but it's crucial. You have to put metrics in place to make sure people are using the tool. The first thing I did when I got to my office on January 2nd or 3rd was I learned a new tool, created a video all about what we were doing and how we were doing it. The tool was AI-enabled. I sent that to everybody to say, "Here I am learning a new tool. How about you learn it as well?"
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> So to-
John Furrier
>> How did that resonate?...
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> describe a change like this as a leader and as a CEO, you have to be multifaceted, you have to be uncompromising, and you have to be relentless.
John Furrier
>> How did that go over, that tool? Were people refreshed by that?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Everyone still has to keep learning, but I would say it went over well because it was, actually, you'll relate to it. It was a video tool. So it was a way to think about, "Okay, instead of us having a meeting and everybody coming to the meeting, how about I create an AI-enabled video to let you know what I'm thinking today?"
John Furrier
>> Kim, I interviewed a practitioner. We have a practitioner who we talked to end user customers and the leaders. And this one guy had a phrase, I want to get your reaction. How does he affect change? He's more technical. I'm the more kind of IT guy. He says, "Demo, no memo." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, the tools are there. If you have an idea, don't send me a memo or an email or a proposal. Show me the product." And there's more in the IT-CISO area because more like cyber and DevOps kind of thing. But his point was he was spending his time evaluating memos that people would spend time writing, and now the same amount of time you could write the memo, you can actually build a prototype.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. Again, I believe that we have to be relentless. We have to be hands-on, as he indicated. This is a transition, so you got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a degree of flexibility, but it's very important to drive and to drive hard.
John Furrier
>> Well, Kim, great to have you on my Mixture of Experts. We've got a lot of content out of your brain and into the AI now in the world. Final question. What are you focused on now? As you look at your journey, you're at the helm with Smarsh. What is your focus? What are you optimizing for? What's your goals?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> The absolute focus that I have leading Smarsh, which is the industry leader in communications, data, and intelligence, is to be relentlessly focused on our clients because our clients are in this ever-changing world. Our clients need something different. I mentioned we just did our show. If I were to compare my notes from last year to my notes this year of what they're asking for, how they're asking for it, it's changing dramatically. We just announced the beginning, for example, of our entire suite of agents. Would we have been plugged into that even a year or two ago? No. But because our clients said, "We want faster and more effective, not just compliance, we want faster and more effective e-discovery, we want faster and more effective investigations," So the crucial focus I have is listening to the client, going back and forth, challenging them, them challenging us, and then us really guiding all of this leading edge technology and people aligned with what adds value to them.
John Furrier
>> Well, Kim, appreciate your time. Great conversation. Again, you've seen many waves. We both live through it. Again, this wave is bigger than ever, theCUBE is here doing its part to share content with you as AI and continues to drive it forward. The next generation and the existing generation, it's coming together in a cultural revolution with AI and a lot of value will be created, a lot of extracted monetization. Of course, our lives will be changed by how we live, work, and play. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here at our New York Stock Exchange CUBE Studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Mixture of Expert Series. We bring in experts to talk about what's going on in their world, but also sharing their view on this new world we're moving into. Obviously, AI infrastructure's the hottest category. It's impacting all of our domains, all verticals, all parts of our life. Kim is here, Kim Crawford Goodman, CEO of Smarsh is here at theCUBE. Thanks for coming in. Good to see you.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Thank you very much for having me, John. It's a delight to be here.
John Furrier
>> I want to get into Smarsh, but we were talking before we came on camera about our previous endeavors in our life going back to the early days of the computer industry. And we both kind of cut our teeth into kind of like the basic building blocks when we had to build everything ourselves. And it really was the rise of a revolution. I mean, the computer revolution in the '80s, '90s was essentially a bunch of missionaries and mercenaries working together to create high-performance computing from proprietary to open. And you had a systems revolution, you had an open source software revolution. Of course, that fueled the internet, web, then cloud. And here we are with AI built on top of all those first principles. How do you explain that to people when you say, "Hey, we've seen this movie before?" You've seen many waves. How do you describe the impact of the AI wave that we're living on? Because it's a full stack, we see vertical integration discussions, we see horizontal scale. How do you make sense of it when you talk to people?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, thank you for the question. I am a Stanford-trained engineer, and I have been a technologist and an executive in technology now for a few decades. And the first thing I tell people is there are just constant waves of transition in technology. And there's no need to be fearful of any of them because we've seen many of them, we've transversed many of them, and we've made business and we've made people's lives better as a result of it. And I, frankly, age myself a bit, but I go all the way back to I went to college with a typewriter and I left college with a personal computer. I worked at Dell when things were moving. I worked at IBM, actually, as an intern, in the mainframe age, and then I eventually worked at Dell where mainframes went to servers. Now, I lead a company called Smarsh, which is a AI-first company and is a public cloud-first company. So all of these things that I have managed before, delivered before are now sitting in the public cloud and we have very close relationships with cloud providers. So, I could go on and on. I could talk about how we went from the personal computer to the mobile phone and how vital the mobile phone is. The AI transition, though, I tell people is another transition. We don't need to be afraid of it, but we need to be a part of it, but it is likely the biggest one we will see in our lifetime.
John Furrier
>> You know, John Chambers, CUBE alumni, I've follow his career since his early Cisco days. He had a quote that I always talk about. "You win in transitions." Companies win in transitions. Telecom is another great example. All this talk about, "Oh my God, the CapEx numbers are so big on this AI infrastructure." But if you look at just the 5G rollout expense, if you actually look at the entire telco numbers, towers, radios, backhaul, all the facilities, the footprints, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. So it seems like we're just scratching the surface when you think about what the demand is for AI because if you can become a native citizen of the wave, you said cloud-first and AI-first, that's an opportunity.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well-
John Furrier
>> Share your thoughts around this because business leaders trying, "What's the right architecture? It's moving so fast. How do I do that?" It's execution risk.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, the quote that "You win in transitions" is exactly right. And we can see this right now in the market and in the valuations. Everyone is trying to figure out the SaaS software space. And if anything, they've been pretty harsh on it from an investment standpoint. As someone who leads a leading-edge AI and SaaS company is completely clear to me what's happening. We're in a transition and the software companies that win in AI align to their underlying technology, align to, if they're fortunate like Smarsh, their underlying database. Those are the ones that are going to be the leaders in the future, but some people will not do that, and those are the ones that will fall away in the future.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. The-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> -
John Furrier
>> The SaaSpocalypse that happened last month or whenever it was when the valuations changed, there's a lot of debate. I mean, I was kind of not on that bandwagon, but I did make the comment, "Bad software always goes away." So if software as a service transitions to AI-native, it's just a new kind of thing. It's not the same thing. So you can't be the same thing in a new market. So you're seeing things like the iPhone's not an iPod. It's an iPod, but it's an iPod and a computer and it's an Apple store and vertically integrated. So that's just a innovator's dilemma.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> And what's going to happen is what we've seen in every transition, which is there will be some new-
John Furrier
>> Yeah....
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> some new people that embrace the new technology, all new ways that will become relevant, but there will also be software companies, technology companies who combine the data they have, the knowledge they have, the skill they have, combine that and adopt the new technologies and principles, and they will also get bigger and stronger. And as a CEO of a software company that has been in AI for quite a long time, this is how you move, this is how you drive, this is how you help your company and your clients be successful.
John Furrier
>> I think the whole valuation shift around the thread of AI has more of a Wall Street lack of information on where the value creation is shifting. I want to get into agents, but first let's talk about Smarsh. Set the table for the folks that don't know what the company's doing and so what its mission is, what it's about. Do a quick plug for Smarsh, your mission, North Star, value proposition, and momentum.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Quite frankly, Smarsh is a tremendous company and more people should know about it. What we do is we work typically with regulated companies. Our most prominent customers tend to be banks, investment houses, et cetera. And we help them with their communications data and the intelligence around it. They primarily do it for, I'd say, the last 10, 20 years, for compliance reasons. They're required to keep all of the emails, text messages, all the communications between-
John Furrier
>> They have to hoard the data....
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> between investment managers, and they're required to keep it for a good reason because they've got to keep it in pure form and they've got to then crawl that data looking for bad behavior. People figured out many, many years ago that when the LIBOR scandal happened, if someone had just been watching what those folks were saying to each other, we could have prevented the entire scandal, and frankly, we could have saved tens of billions of dollars of losses. So what we do at Smarsh is we help our clients with all of this, but as a result of that, and we are the largest and most strategic in our industry, as a result of that, we are experts at the data that is communications data. In fact, we at Smarsh have the second-largest repository of communications data only behind Microsoft. But what we're really expert at is the AI to crawl it, to help our clients and help the industry be protected and find problems. Now what we're seeing is the data so valuable and the ability to crawl it is so valuable, you can do many other valuable things with it.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting. Data storage, we heard rumblings around GDPR back in the day, a lot of privacy, but what you're getting at is by having good data hygiene on the storage side, that's just kind of like you got to check the boxes. But now in the age of AI, it eats up data super fast. We're seeing all the value proposition, retrieval search, RAG. You're seeing now reasoning coming in. Multimodal models can come through that corpus of data and turn data hoarding into an asset.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, you said the key word. We actually at Smarsh just published last month, anyone can go download it, the Smarsh AI Insights Report, to give people some perspectives on the trends that we see in our area of communications, intelligence, and data. And one of those key trends is turning an archive, which people thought as just, "Oh, I need to have it, I have it for security," turning it into an asset because the data itself is well-organized, it's well-indexed, it's verified to be accurate. We at Smarsh say that we preserve and we protect the truth, and that's an important thing to do. And now, you can use that data not just for risk protection and compliance, you can use that data to enliven your CRM.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. It really is a data high strategy because the old model, the way I observed, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like, "Okay, we got to store all this stuff, put it on some storage . Where is it? Which country is it in?" Just to find it, if something happened, they'd have to hire a firm to come in, peel through everything, peel the onion back. Now you have all that data, but it's also tied to workflows and it's tied to well-known domain-specific things. This is the secret sauce of the agent world we're living in right now, which is the winner is coming out of the agent wave is can they get access to the data? Can AI interrogate it, ingest it, organize it, make it an asset, which is like insights, reports and other things? But also then the next one is, okay, this is the workflow. So this is humans doing a job. So now you've got almost the trifecta. Share your vision on that and how you see Smarsh doing that because you're coming in from a, "Hey, we're going to make you sleep easy at night and give you comfort in anything you need with your data." But now, you're actually turning it into a net-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Absolutely....
John Furrier
>> net positive-
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Absolutely....
John Furrier
>> now because you've got workflows.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yes. What we see is, in fact, one of the other trends that we see is the people who manage this data are becoming orchestrators, not just managers of data. So you are absolutely right. It starts with the data itself being high quality. There's a statistic out there that 90% of the data we have can't be used for AI because it's not structured properly, it's not indexed properly. So we clean that up and solve that for our clients over the last couple of decades. And you are absolutely right that one of the ways it comes alive is we are now applying agents to crawl that data, and those agents can then modernize and make far more efficient workflows. So we see the automation of many, many workflows tied to... it will be tied to different sets of data, but very closely tied to the dataset we hold for our calls.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. There's an expression that we've been hearing on theCUBE, and we've even said it ourselves, "AI is only as good as what it can see." That's data. If you look at things we're seeing now on some of the model innovations, security is super hot. Claude just put out the new security model. That's finding exploits that are like 20 years old, zero-days that are 20 years old. Like, "Wait a minute, there's been a zero-day exploit waiting to be unlocked that's been sitting there for 20 years." So you can see the efficiencies. Is this scaring people or is this a strategic imperative to move faster? And this is your world, this is you live this every day.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. I will tell you, just this week I spent time with multiple clients. We had our largest client show ever, actually, in New York a couple days ago. And I will tell you, people are moving. And even though AI is new and what you can do with it, automating workflows is new and everybody has to learn new tools and techniques, everybody knows they must do it because what's happening is you have to embrace AI in your base business.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> And if you don't figure out how to embrace it in your base business, someone else is going to. So they're looking for best-in-class partners with the right agents, the right AI, the right teams, the right data, the right capability to help them move forward.
John Furrier
>> I think you said it right. And I think you bring up a good point. This is something that we're seeing in our coverage and our research is this year the AI is not a strategy risk because you just said it. Everyone knows you got to get it done because it's clear. If you don't, you're going to be driftwood if you don't miss this wave right. The question that comes up is execution risk. You're seeing the C-suite, CEOs and the staff, CFO, CSO, CIO, chief people officer really starting to have to act differently amongst each other as teammates because they have to be a teamwork and partnership because if I'm going to have tokens giving out to employees, they're going to have workers and agents. That's an HR issue. They're going to have finance. I say, "How do I value these tokens? Who pays for them?" So you now have kind of like the corporate organizational thinking around it.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well-
John Furrier
>> As CEO, I'm sure this is on your plate, how are you thinking about your broader organization to affect that change?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Well, again, what we see both inside as well as with our clients who we work closely with is the proper use of AI for greater effectiveness and efficiency will evolve the organization. It's going to evolve it in a few ways. Number one, you can't just worry about the AI. You've also got to worry about the governance of it. In some cases, what we're seeing is the AI is moving faster than your ability to control it, manage it, govern it, et cetera. Number two, we see to take advantage of it, you've got to work across organizations very effectively. I'll use a perfect example. Inside our own organization, we're applying a brand new leading-edge, cutting-edge tool to help us manage across our top 50 accounts. That's not just a tool for sales. That's a tool for our service organization. That's a tool for our executives. That's a tool for our engineers to understand what it is our clients need. So yes, the level of integration and collaboration is going to go to the next level if you want to win in AI.
John Furrier
>> There's so many data sources, a lot of channels of data, a lot of databases. You mentioned tools. As CEO, you're going through organizational change. Every CEO, every C-suite executive I talk to all say the same thing. "We understand what has to get done. we see horizontal scale and all those data challenges," but the question becomes , "Okay, how do I manage my people? So when you have these transitions, which we talked about at the top, you win in there. If the tooling's changing for the human, executive and then the staff below, if you don't evolve with the tools, you'll be replaced by someone who will. Whether you're building homes, a new saw comes out that's, "Oh, electric saw, that's better than the manual saw. You go faster." So the tooling really drives it. As the CEO, how do you communicate that to your staff and your team? Do you say, "Look, we have to adopt the new tools?" And are your customers in lockstep with that and how do those conversations happen? Because this is something that's really not talked about much. Is the tooling adoption impacting the role of the executive, the role of the staff worker and the role of the employees?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. I will tell you, as a CEO, to drive AI transformation, it has to be hit and driven from every single angle. So what do I mean by that? I mean, when I put out my three-year strategy, being a great AI-first company is prominent in that strategy. When you put out your annual goals, everybody moving and using multiple AI tools is in those goals. Leadership is always the key thing. When I think about the leaders that report to me and that report another level below that, those leaders have to actually embody a sense of urgency and a sense of excellence as it relates to AI. You have to find the funding for the tools, which is not always easy, but it's crucial. You have to put metrics in place to make sure people are using the tool. The first thing I did when I got to my office on January 2nd or 3rd was I learned a new tool, created a video all about what we were doing and how we were doing it. The tool was AI-enabled. I sent that to everybody to say, "Here I am learning a new tool. How about you learn it as well?"
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> So to-
John Furrier
>> How did that resonate?...
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> describe a change like this as a leader and as a CEO, you have to be multifaceted, you have to be uncompromising, and you have to be relentless.
John Furrier
>> How did that go over, that tool? Were people refreshed by that?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Everyone still has to keep learning, but I would say it went over well because it was, actually, you'll relate to it. It was a video tool. So it was a way to think about, "Okay, instead of us having a meeting and everybody coming to the meeting, how about I create an AI-enabled video to let you know what I'm thinking today?"
John Furrier
>> Kim, I interviewed a practitioner. We have a practitioner who we talked to end user customers and the leaders. And this one guy had a phrase, I want to get your reaction. How does he affect change? He's more technical. I'm the more kind of IT guy. He says, "Demo, no memo." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, the tools are there. If you have an idea, don't send me a memo or an email or a proposal. Show me the product." And there's more in the IT-CISO area because more like cyber and DevOps kind of thing. But his point was he was spending his time evaluating memos that people would spend time writing, and now the same amount of time you could write the memo, you can actually build a prototype.
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> Yeah. Again, I believe that we have to be relentless. We have to be hands-on, as he indicated. This is a transition, so you got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a degree of flexibility, but it's very important to drive and to drive hard.
John Furrier
>> Well, Kim, great to have you on my Mixture of Experts. We've got a lot of content out of your brain and into the AI now in the world. Final question. What are you focused on now? As you look at your journey, you're at the helm with Smarsh. What is your focus? What are you optimizing for? What's your goals?
Kim Crawford Goodman
>> The absolute focus that I have leading Smarsh, which is the industry leader in communications, data, and intelligence, is to be relentlessly focused on our clients because our clients are in this ever-changing world. Our clients need something different. I mentioned we just did our show. If I were to compare my notes from last year to my notes this year of what they're asking for, how they're asking for it, it's changing dramatically. We just announced the beginning, for example, of our entire suite of agents. Would we have been plugged into that even a year or two ago? No. But because our clients said, "We want faster and more effective, not just compliance, we want faster and more effective e-discovery, we want faster and more effective investigations," So the crucial focus I have is listening to the client, going back and forth, challenging them, them challenging us, and then us really guiding all of this leading edge technology and people aligned with what adds value to them.
John Furrier
>> Well, Kim, appreciate your time. Great conversation. Again, you've seen many waves. We both live through it. Again, this wave is bigger than ever, theCUBE is here doing its part to share content with you as AI and continues to drive it forward. The next generation and the existing generation, it's coming together in a cultural revolution with AI and a lot of value will be created, a lot of extracted monetization. Of course, our lives will be changed by how we live, work, and play. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier