We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what AI can create. Documents, meeting summaries, presentations, images, spreadsheets, emails, research, transcripts—the list gets longer every month. Lord knows I’ve blogged about it plenty of times. But there’s another question organizations probably need to start asking: What are we doing with all this stuff afterward?

AI makes it incredibly easy to create more content, faster. That’s the point. But it also means we’re generating a growing mountain of drafts, summaries, transcripts, AI-generated notes and other digital leftovers that may get stored in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, email or whatever AI application someone happens to be using.

And unlike the junk drawer in your kitchen, some of this stuff may contain confidential information.

AI Has Made Digital Clutter Much Easier

Before AI, creating a 10-page report took enough effort that you probably had a reason for making it. Now you can generate three versions before lunch, ask AI to summarize all three, create a presentation from the summary and then have another AI tool produce meeting notes from the discussion about the presentation. That’s wonderfully productive. But it’s also a lot of files.

The problem isn’t simply storage space. Organizations need to think about which AI-generated materials are official records, how long they should be retained, who should have access to them and when they should be deleted. Meeting transcripts are a good example. They can be extremely useful when you need to remember what was discussed. But should every transcript of every internal meeting live forever? Probably not.

Don’t Forget the AI Tools Themselves

There’s also the question of where all this information is being created. Employees may be experimenting with multiple AI applications, some approved and some not. They may upload documents for analysis, paste information into prompts or allow an AI meeting assistant to record and transcribe conversations.

That makes AI cleanup about more than deleting old files. It’s also about knowing which AI tools have your organization’s information in the first place. This is where basic AI governance and good old-fashioned data management start to overlap.

Maybe It’s Time for an AI Declutter

Organizations don’t need a complicated 60-page policy to get started. Take inventory of the AI tools employees are using. Look at where AI-generated content is being stored. Decide which information actually needs to be retained, establish some sensible deletion rules and make sure sensitive material isn’t sitting somewhere it shouldn’t be.

Most importantly, don’t assume that because AI created something, it somehow exists outside your normal information-management rules. A Copilot-generated document sitting in SharePoint is still a document sitting in SharePoint.

AI is helping us create more useful information than ever before. That’s a good thing.

We just need to remember to occasionally take out the digital trash.

For over forty-three years, CGNET has provided state-of-the-art IT services to organizations of all sizes, across the globe. We’ve done it all, from IT and cybersecurity assessments to cloud services management to generative AI user training. Want to learn more about who we are and how we might be able to help you? If so, check out our website or send us a message!