Organizations are moving fast on AI. Microsoft Copilot is rolling out. Knowledge initiatives are accelerating. Expectations are rising.
But there’s a problem most AI strategies are quietly running into:
AI can only work with the information it can access—and critical business context is still trapped in inboxes.
That was the central theme of our webinar, Reimagining Email Content Management for the AI Era, led by Ron Johnsen, VP Customer Success at harmon.ie. If you missed it live, the recording is now available. In under an hour, it lays out why email is becoming the hidden obstacle to AI success—and what to do about it.
Here’s a quick look at what you’ll learn.
1. AI Isn’t Magic. It’s a Reflection of Your Data.
Copilot and other AI tools don’t “know” your business. They infer from what they can find in Microsoft 365.
Today, that’s a partial story.
Because while Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive are searchable and governed, emails often aren’t. And emails still contain:
-
Decisions and approvals
-
Negotiations and pricing rationale
-
Customer commitments
-
Project instructions and changes
-
The context behind “why we did it this way”
When those emails aren’t saved into Microsoft 365, AI responses become incomplete—or worse, confidently wrong.
Your AI is only as trustworthy as your content foundation. Email is part of that foundation.
2. Manual Email Filing Doesn’t Scale (Even for Good Teams)
Most organizations already have policies about saving important communication. The issue isn’t intent—it’s execution.
People are busy. Triage is tedious. And filing requires choices:
Is this important enough to save? Where should it go? What metadata do I need?
Even disciplined users fall behind. Many never catch up. And the cost is real: time lost, compliance risk, and knowledge gaps that compound over years.
The webinar makes that explicit: humans are the bottleneck in email governance. AI readiness requires removing that bottleneck.
3. A First Look at Smart Filing in New harmon.ie
The heart of the session is a preview of New harmon.ie’s roadmap for “smart filing”—turning email saving from a manual chore into a guided (and ultimately automated) process.
The direction for 2026 is clear:
User-driven filing → AI-assisted filing → AI-automated filing
In the demo, you’ll see New harmon.ie working in the Outlook sidebar to:
-
Identify which emails are actually business-critical
-
Explain why they matter
-
Recommend the best Teams/SharePoint location
-
Help save messages and attachments in one friction-free flow
Instead of relying on memory and guesswork, users get a quick confirmation experience—fast enough to do in the moment.
4. You Don’t Need Copilot Licenses to Start Becoming AI-Ready
A key point from the Q&A: smart filing benefits teams whether or not Copilot is deployed across the organization.
Where Copilot is available, harmon.ie can use it to enrich recommendations with deeper context.
Where it isn’t, harmon.ie will still use repeatable patterns—sender, topic, history, and filing behavior to suggest likely destinations.
That means you can begin improving data completeness and governance today, without waiting on licensing decisions.
5. What’s Coming Next: Making Email Truly Part of Microsoft 365 Knowledge
Beyond smart filing, the webinar previews several high-impact capabilities on the 2026 roadmap, including:
-
Automatic conversation saving
Save the first email, and harmon.ie captures the thread automatically—so teams don’t lose the “middle of the story.” -
Shared categories and visibility
Reduce duplicate filing and let recipients see what’s already been saved, and where. -
Metadata autofill
AI-assisted tagging so saved emails are not just stored but searchable, reportable, and ready for governance. -
Natural language search over saved email
Once email is centralized, you can query it like any other Microsoft 365 content.
Each of these moves email closer to where it needs to be: a governed, discoverable, AI-usable source of business truth.
Watch the Recording
If you’re responsible for Microsoft 365 governance, compliance, knowledge management, or AI strategy, this webinar will give you a practical view of what “AI-ready email” actually means and how to get there without depending on perfect user behavior.
And if you want to see how this applies to your environment, we’d be glad to walk you through it and share what we’re seeing across other organizations.
