It depends entirely on the account. Personal Microsoft accounts save conversations to your account and can use them to improve services unless you opt out. Copilot with a work or school account is covered by your organisation's Microsoft 365 agreement, excluded from training, and visible to your administrators.
Short answer
It depends entirely on the account. Personal Microsoft accounts save conversations to your account and can use them to improve services unless you opt out. Copilot with a work or school account is covered by your organisation's Microsoft 365 agreement, excluded from training, and visible to your administrators.
Copilot is really two products wearing one name, and the privacy answer flips completely depending on which one you are signed into. The first thing to check is the account badge in the top right.
Personal versus commercial
| | Personal Microsoft account | Work or school account |
|---|---|---|
| Conversations saved | Yes, to your account | Yes, within the tenant |
| Used to improve models | Possible unless you opt out | No |
| Covered by enterprise data protection | No | Yes |
| Administrator visibility | No | Yes, including eDiscovery |
| Retention control | Manual deletion only | Set by your organisation |
Signed in with work: private from Microsoft, not from your employer
Commercial Copilot traffic is covered by Microsoft's enterprise data protection commitments. Prompts and responses are not used to train foundation models and stay within your organisation's compliance boundary.
That boundary includes your IT department. Copilot interactions are discoverable through Microsoft Purview, subject to your organisation's retention policies, and available to eDiscovery in the same way as email and Teams messages. If you would not put it in an email to your manager, do not put it in work Copilot.
Copilot also inherits your Microsoft 365 permissions, which means it can surface content from files you have access to. That is the feature, and it is also how people accidentally surface documents in a meeting they did not realise they could read.
Signed in personally
A personal account behaves like the other consumer assistants. Conversations are saved to your Microsoft account history, and Microsoft's privacy dashboard at account.microsoft.com/privacy is where you review and delete them. There are settings governing whether interactions contribute to service improvement; check them, because the defaults are not the conservative option.
Not signed in
Copilot works without signing in, with limited features and no saved history. That is the lowest footprint option for a one off question, at the cost of context and continuity.
Keeping your own copy
Copilot's export story is the weakest of the major assistants. There is no single button that produces a clean archive of your conversations. Personal account history can be reviewed and downloaded through the Microsoft privacy dashboard; work account data is subject to your organisation's export tooling.
Because of that gap, saving as you go matters more here than elsewhere. ChatExports accepts Copilot conversation text and exported transcripts and turns them into structured PDF, Markdown, DOCX, or CSV files locally in your browser. If you use several assistants, converting all of them through one tool gives you a single consistent archive rather than four incompatible formats.
Frequently asked questions
Can my employer read my Copilot chats?
On a work or school account, yes. Copilot interactions are subject to organisational retention and discoverable through Microsoft Purview.
Does Microsoft train on Copilot conversations?
Not for commercial accounts under enterprise data protection. Personal account interactions may be used for service improvement unless you opt out.
Where is my Copilot history stored?
Personal chats live in your Microsoft account and are managed at account.microsoft.com/privacy. Work chats are stored inside your organisation's tenant.
Is Copilot in Word or Excel treated differently?
The same enterprise data protection commitments apply across Microsoft 365 Copilot surfaces when you are signed in with a work account.