New Control Features in Bing Chat Enterprise Service from Microsoft

Microsoft has launched a new Bing Chat Enterprise service plan that gives organizations more control over who can use the service. The new feature allows IT administrators to test the service with a small group of testers before it is rolled out more broadly.

Introducing Alerts and Notifications in Microsoft 365 Lighthouse

Microsoft began rolling out the new Bing Chat Enterprise service in preview in July. This AI-powered chat tool is designed to provide a higher level of data protection for organizations with security and privacy concerns. It provides verifiable answers to questions asked in natural language with citations and visual solutions such as graphs and charts. Bing Chat Enterprise is available at no additional cost to customers with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium subscriptions.

Bing Chat Enterprise service plan

Until now, Microsoft allowed IT professionals to enable or disable Bing Chat Enterprise for all end users in their Microsoft 365 tenants. The new Bing Chat Enterprise Service Plan allows administrators to roll out the service via ring-based deployment. Once enabled, users can access Bing Chat Enterprise when logged into Bing.com and Microsoft Edge with their work (Microsoft Entra ID) accounts. However, it may take up to 48 hours for the changes to take effect.

“A Bing Chat Enterprise service plan (Bing_Chat_Enterprise) has been added to eligible Microsoft 365 licenses in the Microsoft 365 Administration Center. Administrators can use this service plan to manage access to Bing Chat Enterprise for specific users and groups,” Microsoft explained.

Currently, the Bing Chat Enterprise service plan is not available to education customers with A3 and A5 subscriptions. Microsoft plans to notify IT administrators of the service plan’s availability via a message in the Microsoft 365 management center.

Bing Chat Enterprise does not access organizational data

Microsoft clarified that Bing Chat Enterprise only pulls data from the public Web. It does not have access to organizational resources within Microsoft 365, including emails, documents and Teams meetings.

“It can only access organizational data that a user has explicitly typed or copied directly into the chat, or if a user opens Bing Chat Enterprise in the Microsoft Edge sidebar and has given permission for Bing Chat Enterprise to access a document or intranet page opened in the browser. In either scenario, Bing Chat Enterprise does not retain any of this data after the chat session ends,” Microsoft added.

Microsoft explained that Bing Chat Enterprise may be processing data in data centers located in the United States. However, the data is encrypted during transmission and is retained for a short caching period. If you are interested, you can find more details about data processing on the Bing Chat Enterprise Privacy and Security support page.