Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise Service Adds New Deployment Controls

Hero approved Microsoft 365

Key takeaways:

  • Microsoft has launched a new Bing Chat Enterprise service plan for commercial customers.
  • The new service plan allows IT admins to enable or disable Bing Chat Enterprise for specific users or groups.
  • The new service plan is not available for education customers with A3 and A5 subscriptions.

Microsoft has launched a new Bing Chat Enterprise service plan that gives organizations more control over who can access the service. The new offering allows IT admins to test the service with a small group of testers prior to broader deployment.

Microsoft started rolling out the new Bing Chat Enterprise service in preview back in July. The AI-powered chat tool is designed to offer 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 like charts and graphs. Bing Chat Enterprise is available at no additional cost for customers with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium subscriptions.

Bing Chat Enterprise service plan

Up until now, Microsoft allowed IT Pros to enable or disable Bing Chat Enterprise for all end users in their Microsoft 365 tenants. The new Bing Chat Enterprise Service Plan enables administrators to roll out the service via ring-based deployment. Once enabled, users will be able to access Bing Chat Enterprise when signed 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 admin center. Admins 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 for education customers with A3 and A5 subscriptions. Microsoft plans to notify IT admins about the availability of the service plan via a Microsoft 365 admin center message.

Bing Chat Enterprise has no access to organizational data

Microsoft clarified that Bing Chat Enterprise just pulls data available on the public web. It lacks access to organizational resources within Microsoft 365, including emails, documents, and Teams meetings.

“It only has access to organizational data 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 open in the browser. In either scenario, Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t retain any of this data after the chat session is over,” Microsoft added.

Microsoft explained that Bing Chat Enterprise may process data in data centers based in the United States. However, the data is encrypted in transit and will be retained for a short caching period. If you’re interested, you can find more details about data processing on the Bing Chat Enterprise Privacy and Protections support page.