When Copilot, or any AI tool connected to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, answers a question, it searches what the signed-in person is allowed to open and reads it. It adds no access of its own. That sounds reassuring until you ask what the person is allowed to open, because in most businesses the answer has never been checked and is wider than anyone intended.
Why the question only arrives now
Permissions accumulate. A folder shared with everyone during a project is still shared with everyone years after it ends, as is a link that opened a document to the whole business so that one colleague could read it. A leaver's access lingers because the leaving process updates the email directory and forgets the shared drive, and a person who moved teams twice carries the permissions from all three.
Until a tool could find documents by meaning, none of this mattered much, because finding a document meant knowing where it was.
The boundary is the group that is connected
Because a connection cannot be narrowed to exactly what the tool should see, the only boundary is who is connected. That is why our route connects a named first team under a signed waiver, usually your leadership team, and widens only after a review of what the next group can reach. We hold that review even when a deadline is close, because a permission nobody has used in years becomes usable the moment the person holding it is connected.
Four checks to run before the next group is connected
You can run the first three yourself, with your IT team, before anyone from outside is involved.
- Pick one person and look at what they can open. From the group you intend to connect next, choose someone and list the sites, shared drives and folders their account can reach. The list is usually longer than their manager expects, and the entries that surprise the manager are the ones to look at first.
- Search for the words you would least like found. Signed in as that person, search the shared estate for salary, payroll, appraisal, settlement, password and the name of your largest client. Whatever comes back is what a connected tool would also return to that person, without anyone needing to know the folder existed.
- Count the links that are open to everyone. In both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, you can report how many documents are shared with the whole business or with anyone holding the link. That number is a measure of how much tidying comes before widening, and the oldest links are usually the ones nobody will miss.
- Walk through the last three leavers. For each one, check whether and when their account, their shared links and their group memberships were removed. A leaving process that misses any of the three has to be fixed before access widens, since every leaver it misses keeps access that a connected tool can then search.
What the review adds
The checks above tell you how wide the estate is. The permissions review in Guardrails goes further, because it records the decision: who was connected, what they could reach, what was tightened first and who signed it off. That record is what a client's assurance questionnaire, an insurer at renewal or an assessor at audit asks for, and it cannot be assembled later. Once the sharing is tidied, sensitivity labels protect what is left.
If you have Copilot or Gemini already, the question is the same and it matters more, since the tool is live against whatever the permissions currently allow. What Gemini can already see covers the Google Workspace side. Track starts with Govern for exactly this reason, and the readiness snapshot is the first scoped piece of it.