Atos's 2011 'zero email' bid cut internal mail 60% — and made email itself the enemy

In February 2011 Thierry Breton, chief executive of French IT services group Atos, declared war on internal email. He called the flood of data 'fast polluting our working environments' and said only about 10% of the 200 messages employees received daily were useful, with 18% spam — so Atos, then roughly 74,000 people across 42 countries, would work toward eradicating internal email.

The push came out of Atos's Wellbeing@work programme: employees reported that email overload made them uncomfortable and that in some teams mail handling consumed an estimated 30–40% of working time. Rather than only exhorting people, Atos ran 'email etiquette' training, coached managers, and built a replacement stack it called ZEN — Microsoft SharePoint, Lync messaging and the BlueKiwi social network it acquired in 2012 — with profiles, presence and communities standing in for distribution lists.

Within six months internal email was down about 20%. By February 2014, the three-year mark, Atos said internal email had fallen 60% — to around 25 internal messages per mailbox a week — while more than 8,500 communities had appeared. The company framed the results as a fight against information overload rather than a literal zero: formal HR and legal notices still went by email.

The 'zero email' ambition sparked almost as much controversy as praise, as commentators debated whether email could really be retired. Atos's answer was that email was never the true target: the goal was changing how 76,000 people across 52 countries chose tools, so collaboration happened in places that left a record.