How 2025 Shaped the Next Era of Compliance Intelligence

2025 was a defining year for Arctera — a year where our vision, our team, and our customers validated that compliance technology is entering a new era. When we launched as a new company in November 2024, we set out to bring clarity and defensibility to an industry increasingly shaped by AI and expanding regulatory pressure. Thirteen months later, that mission has accelerated beyond expectations.

A Year of Meaningful Milestones

What stands out most about 2025 is not just the pace of innovation, but the impact our work has had on customers navigating highly complex environments.

Industry Leadership Recognized
Independent validation from IDC and Gartner reinforced our position as a leader in eDiscovery and compliance intelligence. These assessments captured what our customers already knew: Arctera is helping organizations meet their regulatory obligations with confidence, speed, and defensibility.

Advancing AI for Compliance — and Compliance for AI
We deepened our focus on bringing practical, auditable AI into customer workflows. At the same time, we took a leading position in the emerging “compliance of AI” space by introducing connectors to Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI. Our surveillance capabilities were an important contributor to our analyst recognition and to customer outcomes.

Joining Cloud Software Group
The year culminated in Arctera's acquisition by Cloud Software Group — a milestone that gives us the operational scale and portfolio breadth to accelerate our roadmap and expand our impact globally.

Looking Ahead to 2026: A More Disciplined AI Landscape

As we enter 2026, the legal and compliance markets are beginning to experience a shift I believe will define the next phase of AI adoption.

Over the past year, organizations invested heavily in specialized AI applications with high expectations of differentiation. But foundational reasoning models from OpenAI, Microsoft, and others have advanced faster than anticipated. As a result, many standalone applications — especially those without proprietary data or domain-specific context — are now delivering outcomes that are difficult to defend as materially superior.

Across the industry, we are hearing customers reevaluate multi-year commitments and reassess the long-term defensibility of their AI investments. The question is no longer “What features does the model offer?” but “What proprietary data, governance, and domain expertise make these results trustworthy and repeatable?”

This recalibration is not a setback. It is a necessary progression toward responsible, sustainable AI adoption — particularly in regulated industries where accuracy, provenance, and auditability matter as much as speed.

Why Arctera Is Uniquely Positioned

This is where Arctera enters 2026 with exceptional clarity.

Our strategy is built on a simple principle: foundational AI becomes transformative only when combined with the right data and the right operational context. We sit at the intersection of both.

Arctera has processed and contextualized year(s) of the most sensitive communication data for organizations— data that forms the evidentiary heart of eDiscovery, surveillance, and compliance workflows. When connected to advanced reasoning models, this data becomes an engine for insights that general-purpose AI simply cannot replicate.

In January, we will introduce our next major evolution of this strategy with new AI-powered capabilities for eDiscovery and surveillance. These releases are designed to make complex investigative workflows faster, more intuitive, and more defensible — bridging the strengths of foundational models with the practical realities of legal and compliance work.

As an attorney, I view this as one of the most important developments in our industry in decades. The opportunity is not merely to “add AI” but to ensure that AI enhances the evidentiary integrity and regulatory posture of every organization we serve.

2026: A Year of Focus and Forward Momentum

Under the Cloud Software Group umbrella, we have the scale to execute aggressively — but our direction remains consistent with the mission we set when Arctera was founded: to deliver compliance intelligence that is accurate, explainable, and actionable.

This blog opens a series of perspectives from across our product organization, each offering a view into the trends shaping 2026 and the innovations we’re bringing to customers. I’m proud to share my reflections as one part of that collective effort, and I look forward to the conversations and progress ahead as we continue building the future of compliance intelligence together.