Microsoft 365 Copilot is quickly becoming a default way for people to write, summarize, search, and make decisions inside Microsoft 365. Microsoft says nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft 365 Copilot. And more broadly, the Work Trend Index reports that 75% of knowledge workers use AI at work, with 78% bringing their own AI tools ("BYOAI").
Copilot isn't a single app. It's integrated across Microsoft 365 experiences, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Loop, Entra, and Copilot Chat for cross-app prompting.
In the same environment, heavy Microsoft 365 users can see 250+ emails per day and 150+ chats per day, while Teams meetings per person are up 3x since 2022. Based on a randomized field experiment of 6,000+ workers across 56 firms, Copilot users spent 18% less time reading email and completed documents 12% faster. But Copilot doesn't just help, it also creates a growing stream of AI interaction data across the business.
Under the hood, Copilot is grounded in organizational context through Microsoft Graph and draws on everything a user is permitted to access, including sensitive corporate records and the personal data of customers and partners.
That's the key point: Copilot isn't generating random text. Copilot is producing work based on real business data and real user activity, so it must be treated as part of the organization's compliance scope.
Copilot conversations often contain the "inside version" of work: raw context, early drafts, internal reasoning, and what someone meant to do. Microsoft treats this as real content. Microsoft's documentation makes it explicit: every user prompt and every Copilot response, complete with citations, is captured and stored as Copilot activity history.
Microsoft Purview is built to govern this kind of content, and Microsoft explains how it wires Copilot interaction records into existing compliance systems: the interaction records are stored in the user's Exchange mailbox in hidden folders so retention and eDiscovery can work. Retention actions also aren't instant. Microsoft notes that Exchange processes these items in the background (a timer job periodically evaluates the records and applies the retention action), and it can take about 1-7 days for retain/delete actions to take effect after a policy change or deletion request. In plain terms: what a user sees in the Copilot UI at a given moment is not a reliable indicator of what's being retained for compliance.
On top of that, employee behavior makes the risk concrete. Security research reports that employees regularly paste company data into AI tools (LayerX reports 77% of employees paste data into GenAI prompts). Even when Copilot runs "inside" Microsoft 365, prompts can still contain sensitive business content that should be governed like other company records.
Afi helps organizations treat Copilot conversations like other important business data: preserved, searchable, exportable, and access-controlled.
Afi backs up user prompts and Copilot replies, including direct Copilot chats and Copilot interactions inside Microsoft 365 apps (for example, Outlook and Word). It stores this data, like all other backup data, in a secure, encrypted offsite location with a company-defined retention policy. All data is instantly accessible.
Compliance teams need access to robust real-time data search and export, and Afi provides exactly that:
This matches the real compliance workflow: find the conversation, confirm relevance, export a clean record.
Because prompts can contain sensitive context, Afi lets you restrict chat content preview via Access Groups (for admins, operators, and end users) and supports audited preview behavior.
Copilot backup is available in the Afi SaaS backup service at no additional cost and can be enabled via Afi's backup SLA policy settings.
Copilot is deeply integrated across Microsoft 365 and widely used. That means Copilot chats and prompts are becoming a steady stream of valuable, sensitive work product that organizations should govern like any other company data.
Afi helps by backing up Copilot conversations (prompts + replies), enabling retention and compliance, making them searchable and exportable, and providing access controls that support real compliance workflows.
Copilot backup is included with Afi SaaS Backup for M365 at no additional cost.
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