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Copilot chats and Teams meeting recaps to expire after 30 days

30 Jun 2026

Copilot chat conversations and Teams meeting recaps (including recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries) will be deleted after 30 days as part of the University’s commitment to efficient data handling.  

It’s important to manage the information that the University holds so we don’t keep unnecessary details that can impact storage, compliance and effectiveness

Information from Copilot use is no exception to this, which is why we are introducing two new automatic deletion rules to help us keep on top of it.

Copilot chat conversations 

From 10 July, all Copilot chat interactions older than 30 days will be deleted. This covers every prompt you make to Copilot and every response it gives you, whether that’s in the Copilot app itself, Copilot in Teams, Copilot in Outlook, Copilot in office apps, or other locations. 

If you delete a conversation yourself, it will still be available within M365 for the remainder of the 30 days. This is because the interactions could be required for incident management purposes during that time.

If you need to use any Copilot interactions for longer than 30 days, you can save or schedule prompts and export responses to Pages or Word (by selecting the 3 dots below a response then ‘Export to Word’), or simply copy and paste the content. 

It’s good practice to have shorter conversations with Copilot because research shows that long-running conversations can become counter-productive. Models are strongest when relevant information appears at the beginning or end of inputs and performance can degrade when key information is buried in the middle. Model performance can become increasingly unreliable as input length grows – older messages can fall outside of the effective working context, receive reduced influence, or add noise that makes it harder for the model to focus on the current task. This additional noise has also  been linked to increased energy consumption.

Teams meeting recordings, transcripts and AI summaries 

From 10 July, new Teams meeting recordings, transcripts and AI summaries will automatically expire 30 days after the meeting, instead of the current 60 days. You can find out in our FAQ on the Copilot Hub.

It is important to delete Teams recordings, transcripts and summaries because: 

  • They can take up a considerable amount of storage space. 
  • There are legal and compliance implications to holding full, verbatim conversations, including informal interactions and personal details, that the University does not need. 
  • Written records of formal meetings should still be produced with human review. Even for more informal meetings, AI summaries should be reviewed to ensure they are an accurate representation of the meeting. 

30-day expiration can easily be adjusted by meeting organisers for individual recordings – see Microsoft's guidance. This isn’t a hard-and-fast deletion rule, it is to encourage good practices and help you keep on top of the increasing number of recordings. There are reasons why some recordings might need to be kept for longer, such as recordings of training sessions for ongoing use or to support an accessibility requirement.  

If a recording expires and you still needed it, don’t worry – the organiser can still recover it from their Recycle Bin for 93 days.  

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