Everything the office ever wrote down

The most useful knowledge in a small business is rarely in anyone's head. It is in the messages.

Think of a family textile business in Bur Dubai, thirty years old. Somewhere in its old emails is the name of the supplier who once got cotton through a port strike, the buyer in Muscat who always pays early, the cousin who knows someone at the bank. All of it was written down once. None of it can be found when it is needed.

Nobody is going to read thirty years of correspondence. There is no person with the time, the patience or the standing to open everyone's sent folder and remember what was in it.

A machine could, and the new software is heading there quickly. It will reach the small firm as soon as the large one. Ask it who in the family has dealt with a particular buyer, or what was agreed the last time a consignment arrived damaged, and it answers in a sentence. Let a few trusted friends and colleagues connect their own, and it can tell you who in your wider circle knows the person you are trying to reach, or who cares about the thing you are working on.

That is an enormous asset. A business that has it will move faster than one that relies on the uncle who remembers.

The objection is privacy, and it is a fair one. People will flinch at the idea of a reader that has seen everything.

But the flinch protects something that was never there. A message sent from a work account was always written for the record. It was never only yours. What changes is that, for the first time, the record can actually be read.