While discussing an update with a colleague via Microsoft Teams about an Excel file he doesn’t have access to—an email referencing a tangentially related conversation in a channel he doesn’t have access to arrived—it struck me how fragmented our digital communication has become. Information is dispersed across emails, chats, and channels, making it increasingly difficult to maintain clarity and continuity.

Over the past week, I’ve engaged in more than 20 one-on-one chats, have unread messages in 8 different Teams channels, and am currently sitting on over 25,000 unread emails. This level of noise is unsustainable. I find myself relying heavily on memory and mental mapping to locate critical information, which is neither scalable nor efficient.

There’s a clear need for me to leverage intelligent AI agents that can help filter, prioritize, and surface what truly matters. The current model forces us to be reactive and overly dependent on manual recall. Despite my ability to eventually find what I need, the process is inefficient and occasionally embarrassing when I can’t immediately locate key details.

This experience underscores a broader challenge: we need better tools and systems to manage information flow, reduce cognitive load, and support decision-making. I believe this is an area ripe for innovation and investment.

Over the years of giving people the features customers desired, Teams developed into an overly complicated morass of places where information gets lost. It’s no longer simple to use. For some it probably still falls into productivity, but for others it might hinder it.