In our most recent Maximizing Mimecast session, Matt Pasternack, VP of Product for Data Governance, Compliance and Insights (GCI), and I had the pleasure of providing a walkthrough of how the GCI platform helps you find, understand, and act on your data across email, collaboration, and now AI systems. It was my first webinar as a Mimecast employee, and after years of working in this space from the customer side, it was genuinely exciting to demonstrate these GCI capabilities for you.
The conversation centered on an organizational shift we are all living through right now: the business environment we work in is changing rapidly, especially around data, humans, and AI, and how all three interact with each other. The need to access critical business data quickly has expanded well beyond traditional archiving and e-discovery into proactive risk analysis, internal investigations, data subject access requests, and this list is still expanding. And these needs are no longer confined to one business team or area. IT, security, legal, compliance, governance, and privacy teams are all asking important questions of the same email, collaboration, and AI business data sources.
If you missed it live, here is what we covered, and why it is worth watching the full recording on demand.
Key takeaways from the session
- A single source of truth for email, collaboration, and AI data. GCI's mission is to make your data immediately accessible, usable, and valuable across the enterprise. With GCI Search and Discover now supporting AI data alongside collaboration data and email, you no longer need to treat email, collaboration and AI sources as separate systems.
- Data Minimization: start your search from anywhere, narrow results before you export. Whether you begin a search with a custodian or person of interest, a keyword, or a specific direct message, you can search across every connected data source — email, collaboration, and AI — at once and see your result count build in real time. That visibility supports a central theme of the session, and of GCI itself: reduce non-relevant data before you ever export. The difference in downstream costs between exporting 3,000 results and exporting nine starts with how data is identified and collected upstream.
- AI-assisted filtering that keeps your data close. GCI uses built-in AI models to help you filter results faster, without sending your data to a third-party service. From there you can narrow your results using filters for PII, sentiment and toxic language, information quality, language detection, and message edit history, getting to the most relevant data without altering the integrity of your original search criteria — so your results stay explainable and defensible.
- Work with your data instead of exporting it. Before you export anything, you can run reports directly within GCI to review and validate findings — without outsourcing to third parties. You can also preview images, PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files without leaving the platform, with image and PDF previews available now and Office document previews coming in the next few weeks. And when reviewing conversations, you can see all participants — including people who were present but inactive — which can help validate and confirm legal hold, deposition or preservation requests for legal and compliance matters.
- Ask: an AI search assistant scoped to your data. Ask is available with Search and Discover and works only with data you have already queried and have access to, and it never reaches beyond your defined scope. Ask returns summaries and answers with the source messages and conversations they came from, so you can confirm context, mark relevant messages, and export what matters. The goal: reduce time to context, so legal matters and investigations move faster without sacrificing accuracy.
- Clean, complete chat exports. You can export conversations as a PDF with the full context your business needs require, with no manual cleanup or redundant copies. Worth noting: unlike the 12-to-24-hour limitation some competitive products place on collaboration chat exports, GCI gives you the full conversational context with no such restriction. Users can customize and assign flexible date ranges based on their specific needs.
A look at what is coming
Starting July 9th, we are simplifying pricing plans with new Core, Pro, and Max tiers. There are no forced upgrades; if email is all you need, you can stay where you are. GCI Core will cover comprehensive data management, historical scans and search, and data access, including future data source integrations, so you are not upgrading every time a new connector ships. Our Pro plan will add proactive analysis, and our Max plan will include communication intelligence, which now covers email data.
For integrations, the next six months focus on two big areas: connecting to more AI systems such as Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini (building on the Claude Enterprise integration), and adding support for file-based systems including SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive, available starting in September 2026. A new backup and recovery product for Microsoft 365 is also launching in August. And for those who asked, Zoom chat and meeting transcripts from Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams are on the GCI roadmap as well.
For reference, today's GCI connected sources include email, Microsoft Teams, Slack Enterprise, Google Chat, calendars, Viva Engage, Claude Enterprise, and WebEx messaging.
Watch the full session on demand
You can watch the full recording in the Mimecast Knowledge Base (login required): Watch Full Session
If any of the capabilities or upcoming plans caught your attention, reach out to your account manager to discuss in more detail.
Next up in Maximizing Mimecast: our next session, Email & Collaboration Threat Protection, takes place July 16. Register here to save your spot
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