DocuWare held its 2025 DocuWorld Partner Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, welcoming about 300 office equipment resellers, partners, and software vendors for a multi-day event focused heavily on artificial intelligence, cloud development, and partner collaboration.
This year’s conference featured the rollout of a new executive team, most of whom were promoted from within the company. Led by recently appointed CEO Dr. Michael Berger, the leadership team emphasized DocuWare’s continued growth strategy and its investments in AI and cloud-based document management solutions. Their growth has been incredible.
While DocuWare was acquired by Ricoh back in 2019, it continues to operate independently. And to their credit, Ricoh seems to have left DocuWare to run as they always have, and they’ve resisted the urge to turn it into a Ricoh branded product. In essence, they’ve kept their hands out of the cookie jar and that strategy seems to be working very well. This autonomy was highlighted during the reseller awards ceremony when Toshiba—one of Ricoh’s competitors—was again named DocuWare’s top reseller, a distinction they’ve held for several years. Other notable winners were DOCUmation, James Imaging and CopyPro.
Office equipment resellers in attendance were treated to a preview of DocuWare’s evolving AI tools, which are shifting the way users interact with document data. In one live demo, the company showcased how its platform could query data across multiple documents and generate a custom report in seconds. One DocuWare executive explained the company’s development shift by saying, “We used to develop like we were building a Google search bar. Now we’re developing like we’re building a ChatGPT bar.”
Instead of simply surfacing files, the AI now extracts specific answers from documents and presents them in a usable format—an approach that’s already in production and showing strong potential for dealer clients in healthcare, legal, and other data-heavy verticals.
DocuWare also continues to expand its industry relationships, welcoming several outside sponsors to this year’s event, including ACDI, ecoprintQ, and Epson—three well-known names in the print management and document automation space.
During a press breakfast held the second morning of the event, Dr. Berger shared insights into the company’s direction under his leadership, pointing to a five-year growth plan backed by strategic investments in cloud infrastructure and native AI capabilities, including assets from a recent technology acquisition, Natif AI. According to Dr. Berger, DocuWare aims to leverage AI to enhance document handling and analytics, with a focus on SMB opportunities. Despite tariff concerns, the company’s AI-driven solutions offer a competitive advantage. No hardware means no tariffs, at least for now! We greatly appreciate Dr. Berger’s willingness to sit and candidly answer questions during our Q&A session.
It was a bittersweet conference as former CEO Max Ertl (joining us from Germany) and Mary Williams attended their final DocuWorld, moving on to enjoy their next phases. We will miss them both!
For office equipment dealers evaluating their software and automation partnerships, DocuWare’s message was clear: they’re building tools for the next generation of information management—without abandoning the reseller-first model that helped get them here. This technology has always been good, now it’s taking a giant step forward. There are not a lot of companies that focus on office equipment resellers in this space and DocuWare is arguably far ahead of the pack and pulling away, something that is easy to see with the updates they provide at their annual European and Americas DocuWorld conferences. Being part of Ricoh clearly helps when it comes to budget and R&D and DocuWare has been reaping the benefits since 2019. This was a fantastic event and we look forward to seeing you at DocuWorld 2026, May 20-21 in Chicago!
SOURCE Industry Analysts Inc.
