The IT Nerd

Exclaimer has released research showing that AI is weakening a basic assumption of business communication: that a polished, professional email reflects the authority and identity of the person who sent it.

The nationally representative OnePoll study of 1,000 US adults found that 65% now use AI in some aspect of their communications. At the same time, 36% have questioned whether a message they received was genuine, while 14% say they do not trust emails from external companies at all. The findings point to a growing gap between how credible an email appears and how confidently recipients can verify who is behind it.

AI is in the inbox and not just for productivity

AI has quickly become a routine part of how Americans communicate. Nearly two-thirds (65%) now use AI in some aspect of their communications, most commonly to improve grammar and spelling (20%) or make their writing sound more professional (19%).

But the research suggests AI is doing more than helping people write better. It is increasingly shaping how they present themselves. Sixteen percent use AI to sound more confident in their communications, 12% use it to soften difficult messages, 10% use it to avoid awkward conversations, and 9% use it to hide uncertainty. That means the tone of an email may no longer reliably reflect the sender’s own judgment or authority.

The more professional the email looks, the easier it is to trust

Trust in company email is already under pressure. More than a third (36%) say they have questioned whether a message they received was genuine, while 14% do not trust emails from external companies at all.

That uncertainty is changing what we look for when deciding whether to believe an email. Rather than relying solely on the quality of the writing, recipients increasingly judge the sender. Full contact details (40%), a professional email address on a company domain (35%), and a clear sender name (30%) are the strongest trust signals.

One finding stands out. Nearly one in four (23%) say a professional, branded email signature makes a company email feel more trustworthy. They ranked it ahead of legal disclaimers (17%) and consistent formatting (16%), suggesting that recipients see the signature as more than a visual flourish.

A verified company domain, a named individual, and a consistent branded signature help recipients distinguish between a message that simply looks convincing and one that comes from a real, identifiable, and accountable person.

Email continues to carry some of the most important communications between organizations and the employees and customers they serve. It is the preferred channel for employer updates (35%), formal complaints to a company (33%), and healthcare information (27%). Its value also lies in permanence. When employees need information they can keep or refer back to, 43% choose email, more than twice the proportion who select any other platform. A further 33% have deliberately used email instead of another channel because they wanted a permanent record.

When recipients cannot tell whether a message is genuine or identify the person responsible for sending it, the reliability of that communication begins to break down.

Sender identity is becoming business infrastructure

The platform carrying a message already influences how people receive it. Forty-three percent say the channel affects how trustworthy a communication feels, while 39% say it shapes their view of its professionalism and authenticity.

For businesses, securing the domain is no longer enough. Organizations also need consistent control over how sender identity is presented in every email, including the name, contact details, company information, and the attached signature. As AI makes professional communication easier to produce at scale, governance must ensure that every message can still be traced to a real person, a legitimate organization, and an accountable source.

Access Exclaimer’s full When it Matters: How People Really Communicate study.

Read the blog here.

Exclaimer today released new research revealing that UK and US adults are increasingly turning to AI to help them communicate on a daily basis, but the technology’s ability to create polished, professional content at scale is also making them more skeptical of the messages arriving in their inboxes and apps. 

The survey of 2,000 UK and US adults found that while over half (58%) now use AI in their daily communications, 41% have questioned whether a message they received was genuine or legitimate.  

The complexity of digital communication is being compounded by the sheer number of platforms people use. The average UK and US adult now juggles at least six communication channels each day, as messaging apps, workplace platforms, social media and email compete for attention and reshape how important information is shared. 

More than one in five (22%) have missed important information because it was sent on a platform they rarely check, while the same proportion have struggled to find an important message because it was sent on what they considered the ‘wrong’ platform for that type of information. A further 18% have lost an important message because a communication platform deleted it, an account was closed or they changed devices. 

Against this backdrop, consumers are becoming more deliberate about where important information is shared. Email emerged as the preferred channel for communications that matter, with over half (56%) of UK and US adults choosing it when they need to keep or refer back to information. More than a third (39%) have deliberately chosen email over another platform to create a permanent record, suggesting consumers increasingly value channels that provide a clear, accessible trail of important communications.  

The medium shapes the message 

The research suggests that where a message is sent is increasingly shaping how it is received. Nearly half of UK and US adults (48%) say the platform used affects how trustworthy a message feels, while 46% believe it influences professionalism and 37% say it impacts how seriously the recipient takes it. 

The findings also suggest the medium doesn’t simply shape the message; it can determine whether it is seen at all. Younger consumers are significantly more likely to miss important information because it was sent on a platform they rarely check, with 33% of 18-24-year-olds reporting this, compared to just 15% of those aged 55 and over. Older consumers, meanwhile, are far more likely to keep important messages for future reference, with 62% of those aged 65 and over saying they have done so, compared to 35% of 18-24-year-olds.  

The end of email? Absolutely not 

New platforms may have changed how people chat, share quick updates and make social plans, but when something has long-term value or consequences, many still turn to email. It remains the preferred channel for making formal complaints to a company (cited by 51% of UK and US adults), receiving important updates like benefits or HR updates from an employer (47%), applying for or discussing a job opportunity (32%), and receiving healthcare information or results (29%).  

That reliance on email for important information is placing a greater emphasis on trust. With phishing still the most common cyber threat facing UK and US businesses, and AI making fake messages harder to spot, consumers are looking for clear signs that an email is trustworthy. And older generations are the most sceptical: over half (53%) of those aged 65 and over say they have questioned whether a message was genuine or legitimate, compared to 26% of 18–24-year-olds.  

When judging whether an email is genuine, the top three trust signals UK and US adults look for are full contact details (45%), a professional company email address (44%) and a clear sender name (31%). Older consumers are more likely to rely on practical signals, with 53% of those aged 65 and over saying full contact details make an email feel trustworthy, compared to 38% of 18–24-year-olds. Gen Z, meanwhile, is twice as likely as the Silent Generation (28% vs. 14%) to view visual cues like company logos and branding as trust signals. Professional email signatures resonate most with working-age adults, with almost a third (31%) of 25-44-year-olds saying they increase trust.  

AI enters the chat 

The role of AI in everyday communication is expanding from editing words to managing impressions. More than half (58%) of UK and US adults now use AI in some aspect of their communications, most commonly to improve grammar and spelling (21%) or make their writing sound more professional (20%). Others increasingly use it to shape how they come across, with 14% using AI to sound more confident, 12% to soften difficult messages and 9% to avoid awkward conversations altogether. 

AI usage falls sharply with age. Just 30% of those aged 65 and over say they use AI in their daily communications, compared with 79% of 25-34-year-olds and 82% of 18-24-year-olds. Younger consumers are also more likely to use AI to navigate difficult social situations. One in five Gen Z consumers (20%) use AI to soften difficult messages, while a similar proportion (19%) use it to avoid awkward conversations, compared to just 5% and 2% of Baby Boomers respectively. 

You can access Exclaimer’s full When it Matters: How People Really Communicate study here: https://exclaimer.com/blog/how-people-really-communicate/ 

Exclaimer today announced the launch of its UKG Ready integration, expanding the company’s growing HRIS integration capabilities as organizations increasingly shift employee data ownership from IT-managed directories to HR systems of record.

According to SHRM’s 2025 State of the Workplace Report, fewer than half of HR professionals, just 43%, rate their organization’s HR technology as effective, with fragmented, poorly integrated systems cited as a leading barrier. Separate research from HR.com found that 81% of organizations experiencing poor HR system integration say it actively prevents them from achieving key HR goals. As a result, organizations are actively restructuring how employee data flows across their technology stacks, and HR systems are increasingly becoming the system of record.

As platforms like Workday and UKG Ready become the authoritative home for employee identity data, most communication tools, including email signature platforms, continue to rely on legacy Active Directory or Google Directory structures that HR teams do not own or control. This creates a persistent gap between where employee data lives and where it is applied.

Exclaimer is among the only email signature platforms building a dedicated, multi-system HRIS integration suite, and the only platform to offer UKG Ready connectivity alongside Workday. With the addition of UKG Ready, Exclaimer continues to expand one of the industry’s most comprehensive HR-focused integration strategies for email signature management, helping organizations automatically synchronize HR-managed employee data into email signatures and meeting themes.

Closing the gap between HR systems and employee communications

For many IT teams, keeping employee directories aligned with constantly changing HR data has become an ongoing operational burden. New hires, promotions, departmental changes, and employee departures often require manual updates across multiple systems to ensure communications remain accurate and compliant.

Exclaimer’s UKG Ready integration helps eliminate that gap by allowing organizations to automatically pull employee attributes from UKG Ready into Exclaimer through BindBee, its third-party data aggregation partner. When employee records are updated in UKG Ready, those changes automatically flow into email signatures and meeting themes (video call backgrounds and branding) without requiring manual intervention from IT teams or employees. Organizations retain control over which data fields are shared, with Exclaimer operating on a read-only basis to ensure data integrity and adherence to compliance requirements.

Reducing manual IT administration while improving governance

The integration also supports Exclaimer’s broader focus on centralized communications governance and automation.

Instead of relying on employees or IT administrators to manually manage signatures, organizations can automate signature updates directly from trusted HR systems, helping to reduce inconsistencies and improve operational control across the business.

For organizations using UKG Ready, the integration enables:

• Automatic synchronization of HR-managed employee data into email signatures and meeting themes
• Reduced manual administration for IT teams
• Consistent employee information across outbound communications
• Faster onboarding for new employees
• Improved brand consistency and governance

The integration of UKG Ready follows Exclaimer’s recently announced Workday integration and forms part of the company’s continued investment in HR-driven employee data integrations.

Supporting the future of communications governance

As organizations manage increasingly fragmented communication environments, businesses are placing greater emphasis on automation, governance, and consistency across every digital touchpoint. Email remains one of the most business-critical communication channels, particularly for regulated industries where accuracy, auditability, and professionalism are essential.

By connecting trusted HR systems to employee communications, Exclaimer helps organizations maintain centralized control and ensure employee information remains accurate across all outbound interactions.

The UKG Ready integration is available now for Exclaimer Pro customers.

For more information, or to see Exclaimer’s Workday integration in action, visit exclaimer.com and start a free trial. For a full step-by-step walkthrough, visit the Exclaimer knowledge base.

About Exclaimer

Exclaimer is the global leader in email signature management for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its cloud platform enables organizations to centrally manage and automate email signatures and video meeting branding, ensuring consistent corporate identity, reducing brand and compliance risk, and meeting regulatory requirements across everyday business communications.

Built for IT and valued by Marketing and Compliance teams, Exclaimer eliminates manual updates, enforces brand governance, and gives organizations greater control over their most critical business communication channels.

Exclaimer is trusted by more than 9 million users across 75,000 organizations worldwide, including Sony, Mattel, Bank of America, NBC, the Government of Canada, the BBC, and the Academy Awards

Exclaimer today announced a new integration with Workday, enabling  organizations to use employee data from their HR system to automatically populate email signatures and video meeting themes.

Workday counts more than 75 million users under contract globally, all of them sending emails with little to no direct connection between their HR record and their email signature. For many of these organizations, Workday is the primary system of record for employee information, from job titles to contact details. But that data often does not carry through to everyday communications. Instead, details shared in email signatures or on meeting are still maintained through an IT-managed directory, manual updates, CSV uploads, and directory workarounds.

As organizations hire and scale, this disconnect can quickly lead to outdated or inconsistent employee details. This increases the workload for IT teams and a higher risk of incorrect information appearing in business communications, undermining professionalism, trust, and compliance. These issues are especially visible during setup and onboarding, where data inconsistencies can delay deployment and create friction during evaluation and rollout.

According to Exclaimer’s recent State of Business Email report, over a third (35%) of global IT teams rank email signature management among their most time-consuming email tasks, while 80% still rely on manual methods or user self-service. Notably, in 16% of organisations, responsibility for email signatures sits with HR, second only to IT, highlighting the growing overlap between people data and everyday communications. With 92% of leaders agreeing that consistent, well-managed signatures are important for building trust and professionalism, the pressure to get this right continues to grow. 

Bringing workforce data into everyday digital communications
This integration allows organisations to use Workday as an employee data source within the Exclaimer platform, alongside directories such as Entra ID (Azure AD) and Google Directory. It extends existing HR and data protection controls into email signatures and meeting themes, so employee data is applied where it’s needed without being duplicated or recreated across systems.

With Workday integration, organisations can:

• Use Workday as a trusted data source – Bring employee details like names, job titles, departments, and contact details directly from HR-managed records into email signatures and meeting themes.
• Reduce manual updates and workarounds for IT – Move away from CSV uploads, ad hoc scripts, and directory fixes with a governed integration that keeps employee data in sync automatically.
• Keep HR as the data owner while IT governs the platform – Maintain clear ownership boundaries by enabling HR to manage employee information in Workday, while IT manages access, deployment, and policy within Exclaimer.
• Maintain accuracy through constant organisational change – Keep signatures and meeting themes aligned as teams grow, evolve, or go through mergers and acquisitions, without repeated clean-up cycles in the directory.

Built for communications governance and data accuracy

Trusted by more than 9 million users across 75,000 organisations worldwide, Exclaimer processes over 20 billion email signatures each year and supports branding across video conferencing platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet.

Email signatures and meeting branding are high-volume, high-visibility touchpoints where inaccurate information is quickly noticed. Yet in many organisations, employee data is still managed separately from the systems used to deliver these communications. With the addition of Workday, Exclaimer connects HR systems directly to these channels, helping organisations keep employee details accurate, consistent, and up to date across communications that carry real weight.

Immediate availability

Exclaimer’s Workday integration is available as part of the Pro plan. Customers can connect Workday and start applying HR-managed employee data to email signatures and meeting themes.

For more information, or to see Exclaimer’s Workday integration in action, visit exclaimer.com and start a free trial.

Exclaimer today announced a reminder for organizations to prioritize email communications governance. On World Cloud Security Day, most organizations are focused on securing access to their cloud systems. But far fewer are asking a more difficult question: what happens after a user hits send? According to Exclaimer, one of the most under-governed areas of enterprise communication is outbound email.

Email continues to sit at the center of modern business operations, yet it is also one of the most widely used and least consistently governed communication channels. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average data breach in the US now costs $10.22 million, and it takes organizations an average of 258 days to identify and contain an incident. These findings highlight how gaps in visibility and control persist across the enterprise, including in how communication is created and sent.

Cloud security has matured significantly when it comes to controlling access to systems, but governance of communication within those systems hasn’t kept pace. Governance often breaks down at the point of execution, where individual users, manual processes, and fragmented tools create inconsistency and reduce control. Findings from Exclaimer’s State of Business Email 2025 report reinforce how widespread this gap has become, with 83% of organizations reporting issues related to email misuse, inconsistency, or risk.

A shift from access risk to communication risk

Exclaimer, recently named for its leadership in SaaS and cloud workplace culture at the 2025/26 Cloud Awards, says this highlights a broader issue in how businesses approach cloud security.

When 83% of organizations are already experiencing email-related challenges, this shows the issue is no longer awareness, but how consistently organizations can apply control. And control breaks down quickly when critical elements like disclaimers, branding, and compliance messaging are left to individual users to manage and implement. As communication scales, this challenge is only intensifying. IBM’s research shows that one in six data breaches now involve AI-driven attacks, underscoring how quickly the volume and complexity of communication is increasing.

The governance gap in enterprise communication

Findings from Exclaimer’s State of Business Email 2025 report reveal a growing gap between how organizations secure access and how they control communication. While investment in platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace continues to rise, only 41% have fully integrated email into their broader security and compliance stack.

In regulated industries, this can introduce real exposure, where missing or inconsistent information may fall short of legal or industry-specific requirements. Even outside of compliance risk, inconsistent outbound communication can erode trust, particularly when customers expect accuracy, professionalism, and clarity in every interaction.

Security at scale requires real-time control

As email volumes increase and communication becomes more distributed across users, devices, and AI-assisted tools, ensuring consistency can’t depend on manual action, it requires policy-driven enforcement that operates in real time, across the entire organization.

Learn more at www.exclaimer.com

Here’s some 2026 industry predictions from Karl Bagci, Head of Information Security at email signature management software provider, Exclaimer for your review. 

1. The major 2026 security shift most organizations aren’t prepared for

The biggest unacknowledged shift heading into 2026 is that the authentication layer is no longer the perimeter. Attackers aren’t breaking in, they’re logging in. Session hijacking, token theft, infostealer malware harvesting credentials at scale. Most organizations still treat successful authentication as proof of legitimacy. In 2026, that assumption will cost them. Continuous verification throughout a session, not just at login, is where we need to be and almost nobody’s there yet.

2. Where the shared responsibility model will fail next

The next fault line in the already strained shared-responsibility model will arise from AI features embedded in SaaS. Every vendor is bolting on AI capabilities, often using third-party models and often processing customer data in ways that aren’t transparent. The shared responsibility model assumes clear boundaries. AI blurs them completely. When your CRM’s AI assistant summarizes confidential deal notes and that data trains a model or leaks across tenants, whose responsibility is that? The contracts will say yours. The reality is you had no visibility or control.

3. How attacker behavior will escalate in 2026

The next evolution in attacker strategy will be AI-powered social engineering at scale. Today’s business email compromise (BEC) is still largely manual. Tomorrow’s is automated and personalized. AI scrapes LinkedIn, correlates with breached data, and generates contextually relevant messages for thousands of targets at once. Each one referencing real projects, real colleagues, real details. Attack quality goes up. Volume goes up. Current defenses are calibrated for neither.

4. Why compliance will have to extend beyond email

A major compliance shift is coming for regulated industries as regulators begin questioning why email is compliant, but other business channels are not. Organizations spent years building email retention, disclaimers, legal holds, and audit trails, then moved half their communication to Teams and Slack with none of that infrastructure. Financial services, legal, and healthcare all have strict requirements around communication records. The regulatory expectation is forming and extending compliance controls across all digital communication channels is no longer optional. I believe enforcement will follow.