The future is already here, it just hasn’t reached eDiscovery yet.

For readers following the news cycle, this statement may conjure images of AI automation taking over vast swaths of what used to require human specialists. In all honesty, these were not the thoughts we had in mind when founding Farsight, thoughts that are no longer as prominent in public discussion, yet surface as soon as deeper conversations about the direction of eDiscovery are held.

Questions about reliability, about ever-increasing hardware demands, about whether on-premise installations will still have a future, or if the big players will make this an impossibility, and whether cost-effectiveness can be improved. Things that should take minutes take hours or even days and things that should be predictable are not. Something is not right in eDiscovery. Some tools are advancing at a break-neck speed, others cannot keep up with the demands placed on them.

Perhaps the upheaval around AI is the right moment to rethink trodden paths? A synergy in which what can be effectively done by AI is, where deployment flexibility is retained and whatever hardware is available is used to the fullest extent, scaling to the largest workloads imaginable.

As admins and project managers in eDiscovery, these thoughts remained in the back of our minds while putting out fires that were not advertised as part of the job, yet somehow always present.

From us to you, we hear you. We’ve switched from being users of software to makers of software. Stay tuned.