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Benjamin Schilz, CEO at secure collaboration workspace platform, Wire, writes: collaboration platforms were built to make work faster and easier, but they’ve also become some of the richest stores of enterprise information.
Every conversation adds another layer of context that simply didn’t exist when business communication was fragmented across meetings, emails, and disconnected documents. Decisions no longer arrive as polished conclusions, but develop over time through questions, revisions, shared ideas, and increasingly through interactions with AI, leaving behind a detailed record of how an organisation thinks, collaborates, and ultimately reaches its most important conclusions.
However, while extremely beneficial, this new “joined up” way of working carries implications that many security teams have yet to fully address – or even notice. Security investment tends to focus on protecting identities, endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure, but the “conversations” or exchange of data flowing between them pretty much go ignored. Those conversations now regularly contain intellectual property, commercial ideas, operational information, and institutional knowledge that rarely exist anywhere else in quite the same form. As organisations continue embedding AI assistants, workflow automation, and third-party integrations into everyday collaboration, protecting the confidentiality of these exchanges is becoming an architectural consideration that extends well beyond the messaging platform itself.
Enterprise’s most valuable intelligence
When we think of intellectual property, or the information that organisations value the most, we think of it being stored within secure databases and carefully managed systems. But now those systems are talking to each other. A design specification might explain what was built, but the discussion that led to it often reveals why particular decisions were made, which alternatives were rejected, what concerns remain unresolved, and where future opportunities may lie. In isolation, each exchange is fairly innocuous and routine, but viewed collectively, they form a remarkably detailed picture of how an organisation operates. And that picture can be very valuable to would-be attackers.
Collaboration platforms used to be transient messaging tools – a way for employees to communicate with one another over a secure channel – but today they’re more like knowledge repositories that various systems need access to in order to keep operations moving. Conversations that might once have disappeared, or at least been forgotten, after a meeting are now persistent, searchable, and increasingly accessible to AI assistants that can summarise, retrieve, and connect information across projects. According to Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index, 75 per cent of “knowledge workers” already use generative AI at work, while 78pc of those users are bringing their own AI tools into the workplace. The issue is that as conversational data becomes easier to discover and reuse, it also becomes a more attractive source of intelligence – and that invites risk.
Every integration expands the conversation’s reach
The value of collaboration data starts and ends with the people taking part in the conversation. Or, at least, it used to. Modern platforms sit at the centre of a much broader digital ecosystem, connecting project management tools, customer systems, document repositories, AI assistants, and countless other business applications. That means information no longer remains within a single thread or workspace, but moves continuously between systems, carrying context with it as workflows become more connected and increasingly automated.
That growing interconnectedness brings enormous benefits, of course, but it also changes the nature of enterprise risk. A confidential discussion may be summarised by an AI assistant, referenced in a project update, linked to supporting documentation, or used to trigger an automated workflow, and that gives it a very broad footprint.
According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, involvement from third parties played a role in almost one third (30%) of breaches globally – a trend that is set to continue in the coming years. As collaboration platforms become the connective pathways between people, applications, and AI, understanding how sensitive information moves through that ecosystem is becoming just as important as protecting the systems themselves.
Security strategy hasn’t fully caught up
Most organisations recognise that collaboration platforms require governance, but much of that effort is invested in visibility, compliance, and user behaviour. Those are all important, yet they don’t fully reflect the role these platforms now play inside the enterprise. If conversations have become a primary source of commercial knowledge, what matters isn’t who has access to the information now, but who might be able to infer value from it a month, a year, or five years from now. As AI makes it possible to process vast quantities of communication at speed, even routine exchanges can reveal patterns that would have been almost impossible to identify manually – who influences decisions? How do approvals work? What are the executives most focused on? And so on.
The conversation surrounding modern collaboration tools therefore needs to move from features to architectures. The confidentiality of enterprise communication can no longer be considered solely at the application layer when information routinely flows between conversations, files, integrations, and automated services. Every point at which that data is decrypted, processed, or shared creates another opportunity for sensitive information to be exposed, whether through malicious intent, operational error, or unnecessary access. As organisations continue redesigning their digital workplaces around collaboration and AI, the communication layer itself deserves the same level of architectural scrutiny as the networks, identities, and cloud services that support it.
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