AI in Email Archiving: Why We're Taking a Different Path

By Nils Artishdad, Managing Director at ARTEC IT Solutions

The technology industry loves its gold rushes. Every few years, something new captures everyone's imagination, and suddenly every vendor is scrambling to slap the latest buzzword on their products. After three decades in this business, we've learnt to take a different approach.

When mobile apps became mandatory for every enterprise product, we didn't just shrink our interface to fit a phone screen. We thought hard about why someone would actually need to access their corporate email archive on a mobile device, and what security that would require.

What's now called blockchain is something we've been doing since 2005 with our digital signatures for archived documents. Cryptographic signature chains with digital timestamps to protect archives from tampering. We never needed a fancy name for it. A bridge isn't called a "Cross-Water Transportation Enablement Platform," and we simply call our digital signatures what they are.

When everyone rushed to the cloud, we held back with ARTEC Trusted Cloud as our hosting solution, gathering experience to get it right with EMA Cloud. EMA Cloud runs on leading hyperscaler platforms in the EU and other locations globally with multiple redundancy, providing each customer with a fully isolated archive using true zero-knowledge encryption. With EMA Cloud, we as the service provider have no access or visibility into your archived data, and unlike the usual practice, neither do the hyperscaler platform operators. This is how we define enterprise-grade security: thoughtful architecture, complete implementation, zero compromises.

This is how we've always operated. Let others rush to market with half-baked implementations. We think it through and then build something that actually solves the problem. Now with AI, I'm watching the same thing play out again. The same rush to implement, the same vendor lock-in dressed up in new clothes, the same fundamental mistakes.

The Rush to AI Integration

Today, software vendors across our industry are making the same mistake. They're selecting an AI provider, embedding it directly into their products, and forcing their customers to accept whatever terms, pricing, and limitations come with that choice. Your sensitive data flows through their chosen model, processed by their selected provider, under conditions you had no say in determining.

This should sound familiar because we've been here before. It's the same vendor lock-in strategy that has frustrated enterprise customers for decades, just wearing a new costume. The technology changes, but the fundamental problem remains unchanged.

Consider what happens when your vendor's chosen AI provider triples their prices. Look at Cursor: when their underlying AI provider raised prices, users faced a stark choice: accept the service degradation, pay up, or rebuild their entire workflow. And that's a relatively mild example since you can switch development environments fairly quickly. With an archiving solution containing years of your business data, the stakes are much higher.

What recourse do you have when new regulations make their data processing methods non-compliant in your jurisdiction? What happens when the AI model they selected becomes obsolete, or when you need capabilities that their provider simply doesn't offer? What if you've invested in developing your own specialised AI models tailored to your industry's unique requirements?

The answer, unfortunately, is that you're trapped. You must either accept the limitations or undertake the costly and disruptive process of switching to an entirely different archiving solution. This is precisely the scenario we've spent three decades helping our customers avoid.

A Different Approach

I believe there's a better way. Rather than dictating which AI tools you must use, we're building a framework for our upcoming AOS 7.0 release that puts control back where it belongs: in your hands.

This framework enables you to trigger custom actions when users search your archives, process results through your preferred AI tools, and preview enhanced content with whatever AI assistance makes sense for your organisation. You decide which providers to use, what data to process, where that processing occurs, and how the results integrate back into your archiving workflow. You control the system prompts, the model's temperature and token use, and what it is allowed to access.

This isn't just about technical flexibility. It's about respecting the fundamental principle that your data is yours, and the tools you use to process it should be your choice as well.

How It Actually Works

Our Universal Actions Framework contains what's emerging as the Model Context Protocol standard. Think of it as a universal translator between your archive and any AI service.

When a user performs a search or triggers an action in EMA, our framework calls out to your chosen AI endpoints. They can then access your archive's data through our comprehensive API suite; the same APIs we've been refining for years. Need to search documents? That's our search API. Want to analyse attributes? The attribute API is there. Extracting specific documents for processing? Our download API handles that securely.

These aren't proprietary connections that lock you into specific providers. They're standard REST calls that work with any service that can receive and respond to web requests. Your AI service processes the data according to your specifications and returns enhanced results that EMA seamlessly integrates into the user interface. The beauty is in what we don't do. We don't intermediate these connections. We don't force your data through our servers. We don't require specific AI providers or models. EMA talks directly to your chosen AI services, using the same secure API infrastructure you already trust for your other integrations.

Want to use an on-prem AI model for sensitive data? Configure EMA to point to your internal servers. Prefer a cloud-based service for general enquiries? That's a simple configuration change. Need different AI models for different departments or use cases? The framework supports multiple concurrent connections.

Real-World Applications

Let me share some concrete examples of what this flexibility means in practice.

One of our financial services clients needed to automatically categorise emails according to their specific regulatory framework. With traditional AI-integrated archiving solutions, they would have been limited to whatever categorisation schemes the vendor's chosen AI could provide. Using our framework, they connected a specialised financial services AI model that understood their unique requirements and terminology. When regulations changed six months later, they simply updated their categorisation model without touching their archiving infrastructure.

Another customer in the healthcare sector required extraction of specific patient information from archived documents whilst maintaining strict HIPAA compliance. Rather than trusting a generic AI service with sensitive health data, they integrated their own on-premises AI solution that never allowed protected information to leave their controlled environment.

A European manufacturer faced a different challenge. They needed AI assistance for their archived data but were concerned about upcoming regulatory changes. Our framework allowed them to start with one AI provider and seamlessly switch to another when their legal team identified compliance concerns. No vendor lock-in, no painful migrations, just a simple configuration change.

The Regulatory Maze

Governments worldwide are racing to out-regulate each other on AI. The European Unions's AI Act turns software vendors who embed AI into "AI system providers" with massive compliance obligations. The United States is tackling this with executive orders and agency-specific guidelines. Japan is currently betting on industry self-regulation and that it will all turn out okay. China is regulating the underlying algorithms themselves. And the rest of the world is taking notes, following one approach or another.

With hard-coded AI, you're tied to your vendor's compliance strategy. When they become an AI system provider in the EU, you might be one too. When new U.S. guidelines drop, you live with whatever interpretation your vendor chooses.

We draw a clear line here. ARTEC remains an archiving provider. We give you the tools. How and whether you use them is your call.

This matters especially for international operations. Through our federated search feature, you can already build global enterprise archives that respect national boundaries and regulations. The same applies to AI. Need one approach for Europe, another for the U.S., something different for Asia? When regulations shift, which they inevitably will, simply adapt your AI strategy at the national level and keep moving.

The ARTEC Philosophy

One thing is important: ARTEC IT Solutions will not become an AI company. We are and remain specialists in archiving, because that's what we can do and what we do well. You can rely on that. But we also see how AI is changing and simplifying work with archived data. That's why we're creating the technical foundations so you can use AI, but on your terms. You retain full control over your data, your processes, your compliance. We provide the tool, you decide how to use it. That's our understanding of partnership.

No vendor lock-in, no hidden costs, no surprises – this is the promise we've been making for decades to every customer who chooses EMA. We're amongst the few remaining providers with genuine flat-rate pricing. Whether your archive or your company grows – the price stays the same. In a world full of subscription models and usage-based billing, that's practically an exception nowadays. With EMA you can focus on your business without worrying about possible surprises on your next bill.

Looking Ahead

AI is coming to enterprises, that's beyond question. The crucial question is: How do we shape this transformation?

The convenient path for us would have been to decide this for you by selecting an AI solution and building it permanently into EMA. Many of our competitors are currently taking this route, and in the short term it might even appear attractive. A tick in the "Supports AI" box, nice screenshots for the marketing department, job done.

But we know our customers. You've built individual processes over years, developed special requirements, established your own compliance standards. Forcing you into a pre-made AI solution would be disrespectful—and short-sighted. Because what's state-of-the-art today can be outdated tomorrow.

Our Universal Actions Framework is deliberately a different approach. It respects your expertise, your requirements, and your future. You decide which AI technology fits your company. You retain control over your data. You remain capable of acting when markets, technologies, or regulations change. Whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever comes tomorrow, our framework supports it. And if you've developed your own models, we're happy to help you connect them.

30 years of experience have taught us one thing: you make the best technology decisions yourself. Our job is to give you the necessary tools to do so. No more, but no less either. With EMA's Universal Actions Framework, you're not betting on our AI strategy. Instead, you're implementing your own. That's the ARTEC difference. That's how we've built lasting partnerships for three decades. And that's how we'll continue serving our customers for decades to come.