Smarsh Launches AI-Enabled Communication Surveillance for Small to Medium Businesses

New Noise Reduction Agent enhances communication intelligence, reduces false positives, and brings focus to real compliance issues.

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As compliance teams across financial services struggle to keep pace with exploding volumes of digital communications and intensifying regulatory scrutiny, Smarsh today announced the launch of its Noise Reduction Agent, an autonomous AI capability designed to dramatically reduce compliance alert volume up to 60% and eliminate thousands of hours of non-actionable review work each month.

For small and mid-sized financial firms operating under the same regulatory obligations as the world’s largest banks—but without comparable staffing—alert fatigue has become a structural risk. Reviewers often process thousands of daily communications, the majority of which pose no regulatory concern.

“Compliance teams aren’t overwhelmed by misconduct—they’re overwhelmed by the volume of noise,” said Sheldon Cummings, President, Corporate Business at Smarsh. “Noise Reduction Agent allows firms to suppress low-risk communications before they ever reach supervision queues, dramatically reducing review backlogs while preserving full regulatory defensibility.”

Early preview reports have shown promising results.

• Up to 60%+ reduction in false positives
• 40+ hours saved per reviewer per month
• 20% increase in redirected capacity

How it Works

Today, nearly half of all global email traffic is spam, highlighting the scale of the noise compliance teams must filter every day. Unlike traditional filtering tools that operate after alerts are generated, Noise Reduction Agent applies AI during ingestion within Smarsh Professional Archive. The system automatically identifies and suppresses low-risk email content—such as spam, disclaimers, newsletters, promotional text, and automated system messages—while preserving complete records for audit and regulatory purposes.

This proactive approach enables firms to reduce operational burden without compromising supervision, compliance, or defensibility and allowing them to focus on real compliance issues.

Expanding AI Beyond Global Banks

While AI-powered surveillance has historically been deployed primarily by the largest financial institutions, Smarsh is making mature AI capabilities accessible to smaller compliance teams for the first time.

The Noise Reduction Agent builds on more than a decade of AI innovation deployed across the world’s largest financial institutions and reflects a broader shift toward autonomous AI systems that augment human expertise rather than replace it.

“We’re proud to deliver a scalable surveillance solution grounded in best-in-class AI governance and model risk management,” said Maya Keekattil, VP of Product Management. “Our mission has been clear: bring enterprise-grade AI supervision to small and mid-sized firms in a way that is accessible, affordable, and built for regulatory confidence.”

Smarsh was named a Leader for the seventh consecutive time in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions. Download the full Gartner Digital Communications Governance report here to see why Smarsh continues to set the standard for compliance.

About Smarsh

Smarsh enables companies to transform oversight into foresight by surfacing business-critical signals in all of their digital communications. Regulated organizations of all sizes rely upon the Smarsh portfolio of cloud-native digital communications capture, retention, and oversight solutions to help them identify regulatory and reputational risks within their communications data before those risks become losses, fines, or headlines.

Smarsh serves a global client base spanning the top banks in North America, Europe, and Asia, leading brokerage firms, insurers, registered investment advisors and U.S. federal, state and local government agencies. To discover more about the future of communications capture, archiving and oversight, visit www.smarsh.com or follow Smarsh on LinkedIn.