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Top Priorities in EMEA: Community, AI, and Continued Innovation

Steve Couling

After two long years of virtual conferences, the energy and enthusiasm of the Relativity community was on full display this morning as we kicked off the first in-person Relativity Fest London since 2019. 

In the very same venue where the EMEA community last gathered together in person, customers and Relativians met to discuss compelling trends in the market, the changing shape of data, and how these forces are a catalyst for innovation in the software and our community.

Of course, Relativity Fest London is, above all, a celebration of and for our EMEA customers. To highlight that focus on this important region, I was the first to take the stage to welcome attendees back to in-person events.

Here are some of the highlights of the opening keynote of Relativity Fest London.

How EMEA powers the pursuit of justice

Our EMEA customers represent a flourishing—and growing—part of our global community. I began the keynote by sharing a video that illustrated the breadth and depth of the work our customers do in all corners of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The video captured just how diverse our customers are in EMEA, in their geographies, their industries and use cases—beautifully aligned to the growth and diversity of our own Relativity EMEA team. We wanted to make sure we put that centre stage because it’s you, our customers, that drives us forward.

As we put the spotlight on Relativity’s EMEA workforce, I highlighted the invaluable work that Relativians from Poland are doing to open their homes and their hearts to provide support to Ukrainians seeking refuge in Poland.

We’re incredibly proud of our Polish colleagues, who have worked tirelessly to provide support and aid to our Ukrainian neighbours. At Relativity, we stand with the people of Ukraine and support those impacted by this devastating humanitarian crisis.

To date, the global Relativity community has stepped up to raise $2.2 million in aid to Ukraine.

To us, powering the pursuit of justice is not just about how our software can help change the world, but how our values, our ethos, our people, and our culture are built on our fundamental commitment to building a better, more inclusive, more tolerant, and more just world.

A growing and diverse region

Our customers in EMEA have always represented an integral part of Relativity’s success. We have long celebrated and recognised our customers around the world, as well as the differences in experiences they face and the complexities associated with managing data in vastly diverse environments. 

We are a truly global organisation, and we believe we have built a workforce in EMEA with talent and dedication that are second to none.

We launched data centres in Ireland and the United Arab Emirates last year, and we’re opening new ones in France and South Africa in 2022. With other recent data centre openings in India and Japan, we have never been in a better position to serve our international customers—particularly those in EMEA.

And it’s not just about growing our community in EMEA that’s important—it’s also about building a community where everyone feels welcome and feels that they belong.

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging is part of the DNA of our company, from how we hire, to how we show up to events, to how we build a culture that we all want to be part of.

I’m proud of the diversity we are proactively building into our team—from the almost 50/50 gender split to our partnership with associations that champion diverse talent, such as 10000BlackInterns and Black Tech Queens.

The coming AI revolution

CEO Mike Gamson has spoken before about the coming AI revolution, notably at the launch of Relativity’s AI Visionaries program earlier this year. Taking the stage next, he emphasised its importance once again in his opening remarks as he spoke about the need for a tool to keep up with growing data volumes.

“Consider this for perspective on the sheer volume of data we’re dealing with today,” he said. “Organisations around the world will generate 97 zettabytes of data per year, which is more than twice the data they generated before the shift to remote work, in 2019.”

As data volumes grow, so does the complexity of dealing with the data.

“Today, we simply have more data than we can effectively deal with—and this is precisely where AI will play a crucial role,” Mike said.

We at Relativity remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver cutting-edge solutions that will help you thrive, even in an increasingly dense and complex data landscape.

And in service of our mission to empower you to organise data, discover the truth, and act on it, we will continue to invest in AI and machine learning technologies, advance our AI integration with TextIQ to deepen our capabilities, and develop and cultivate the people and skills required to innovate on those technologies.

“This is something we’re incredibly passionate about,” Mike said. “Optimising the potential of AI will require deeply invested, highly skilled subject matter experts who recognise its benefits, clear the way for its adoption, and put guardrails in place to ensure that it’s used safely and ethically.”

New capabilities and innovations built for productivity

Next, Chief Product Officer Chris Brown took over hosting duties to share the product capabilities we’re prioritising for the EMEA community, with a focus on AI, optimising key workflows, and security and privacy.

Collect’s Continued Growth

We’ve seen the usage of Collect more than triple in the past year alone. To keep up with the growing data sources people use to communicate and store information, we continue to add new sources to Collect. Later this year, we’re adding iManage, SharePoint, Smarsh, and Enterprise Vault (for Relativity Trace) to the list of platforms that users can collect data from.

Scaling Automated Workflows

Our customers have seen huge successes and time savings in adopting Automated Workflows. On average, each customer using the solution has saved 164 hours and 5,780 clicks in just the past six months. To help increase efficiency even more, we’re introducing parallel execution, which will let users run multiple actions at the same level in their workflow at the same time. Plus, we’re introducing a “Copy to Workspaces” feature which will allow users to create copies of their workflow across one or more workspaces.

Automatic Translation with AI

We’re incorporating AI machine translation directly in RelativityOne. Users will be able to translate documents in more than 100 languages and 2,000 language combinations. We’re kicking off an Advanced Access program this month, and it will be refined for general availability later this year.  

New Security Alerts

We recently launched Security Alerts, which provide notifications that help you identify and resolve threats to your instance quickly. You can evaluate your security posture and act on threats in one place with a unified view of real-time indicators and resolutions paths to help keep your data safe.

Enhanced AI Capabilities for Trace

To help compliance teams meet today’s challenges, we’ve built brand new AI capabilities specifically for Relativity Trace that expand our customers’ ability to locate the riskiest content within their organisations and cut through the noise. We are now shipping risk detection models out-of-the-box, which you can enable with just a single click on the first day you enter the system.

AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, powered by AI, allows users to identify positive and negative sentiments in   their data. Sentiment Analysis lets teams look at their data in a whole new way, giving them the chance to develop insights they wouldn’t have without it. It’s now in Advanced Access and will be available to RelativityOne users later this year. 

Relativity, with the help of insights from our global community, is constantly working to solve challenges and create inventive solutions for our customers.

“We’re building an engine of innovation within Relativity," Chris said, "where we continually bring new product capabilities to market—particularly in the areas of AI and machine learning—that can dramatically improve our customers’ productivity in RelativityOne."

2021 Data Discovery Legal Year in Review

Steve Couling is Relativity's managing director and vice president of sales for the EMEA region. He joined Relativity in 2012, leading the growth of international operations and working closely with customers around the world.

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