Sell your company's Microsoft 365 records to AI

A Microsoft 365 tenant holds the three records most companies run on: Outlook mail and calendars, SharePoint document libraries and each person’s OneDrive. Six of the companies we list take at least one of them. Teams chat sits in the same tenant and has its own page.

Microsoft’s terms leave the records yours

Microsoft’s data protection addendum says the customer retains all right, title and interest in Customer Data, and its product terms say Microsoft’s generative AI services won’t use Customer Data to train any generative AI foundation model except on the customer’s documented instructions. Licensing a copy to someone else is your decision, not Microsoft’s.

Outlook: one mailbox at a time, or all of them through Purview

Any user can export a whole mailbox, calendar and contacts to a .pst file from Outlook’s settings. For every mailbox at once, an admin uses eDiscovery in the Microsoft Purview portal, which downloads mailbox items as PST files or individual messages. Purview eDiscovery needs a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license, and an export package is deleted 14 days after it’s created, so download it the same week.

SharePoint and OneDrive: download, sync or eDiscovery

Files and folders download straight from SharePoint and OneDrive, with a cap of 250 GB and 10,000 files per download, or sync in full through the desktop app. An eDiscovery export copies the native Office files from sites and OneDrives along with the mail.

The clocks that run out

• A deleted user’s OneDrive is kept for 30 days by default, then deleted. Removing staff accounts during a wind-down starts that clock on their files.
• After a paid subscription ends, Microsoft keeps the data in a limited-function account for 90 days so you can extract it. Data left behind might be deleted after 90 days and will be deleted no later than 180 days after cancellation.
• Deleting the subscription outright skips the wait. Microsoft says an explicitly deleted subscription skips the expired and disabled stages, and SharePoint and OneDrive content is deleted immediately. Let it expire instead.

Your staff and your customers wrote it

Mail is the most personal record a company holds. Before anyone sees a sample, take out HR threads, health and salary mail, legal advice and anything a customer sent in confidence, and ask each company how it removes names and personal details. The email page has the full list, and the rights checklist covers customer contracts and privacy notices.