Irfan Shuttari
Director of Product Management, Head of AI Strategy
CLOC 2026: What AI Connects To What Matters
CLOC is often where you see priorities shift in real time. This week in Chicago, that shift happened quickly.
Anthropic’s release of 20+ connectors for Claude in legal changed the tone of the conversation. The focus moved almost overnight from AI capabilities to AI integration.
That change is exposing a more practical challenge.
Legal teams don’t lack AI tools. They lack clean, governed ways to connect those tools to the data that actually matters. As connectors expand, the bottleneck isn’t functionality. It’s access—specifically, access that preserves context, policy, and trust.
Communication data -- including email, collaboration and mobile messaging -- is a clear example. It holds decisions, approvals, and risk signals, but it’s also one of the hardest data sources to activate safely.
In response to that shift, we introduced Arctera AI Converge at CLOC.
It’s a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector framework that allows tools like Claude to connect directly to Arctera archives and access petabytes of email data, without stepping outside existing governance controls.
The goal isn’t to add another AI layer. It’s to make the systems of record AI-ready.
This quick update from the floor captures what we’re seeing and how teams are reacting:
The direction is becoming clearer.
AI in legal will depend less on standalone tools and more on how effectively those tools connect to enterprise data. The teams that get that connection right will move faster without increasing risk.
We’re continuing these conversations with teams here at CLOC and exploring how this approach fits into existing environments.