Microsoft began rolling out its Bing Chat Enterprise solution for companies and EDU back in July 2023 during its Inspire conference, with the hopes that the artificially intelligent infused repository could help business and education markets further protect their commercial data, summarize data, create content, learn new skills and more.
The initial rollout of Bing Chat Enterprise admin controls was pretty basic and included a binary on-and-off switch for employee usage delegated by the admin staff, however, a new Enterprise Service Plan has been announced that will bring user-level granularity for admin distribution.
To address this customer request, a Bing Chat Enterprise Service Plan can now choose to roll out Bing Chat Enterprise to a subset of users before deploying across the organization. Once assigned, users signed in with their work or school account (Microsoft Entra ID) can access Bing Chat Enterprise from entry points such as bing.com and the Microsoft Edge sidebar.
The new ring-based deployment common with IT admins looking to seed new features and platforms to a subset of qualified employees, will unfortunately not be accessible to Bing Chat Service Plans A3 of A5 licenses for now, but Microsoft does mention that it “will be added later.”
Microsoft reminds admins that simply turning off Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t eliminate an employee’s access to the platform but instead saddles them with a consumer version of the experience that is notably less secure and less useful than what the company may need or want.
The new Enterprise Service Plan appears to be a no-cost additional function for businesses already invested in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium licenses and still offers Microsoft’s proclaimed tenant boundaries that discard all user prompts after a short caching period.
Despite most LLM based platforms, Microsoft continues to espouse that its Bing Chat Enterprise is a different beast than its consumer counterpart because “it doesn’t have access to organizational resources or content within Microsoft 365 such as documents, emails, meetings, or Microsoft Teams messages. 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.”
To get access to the new Enterprise Service Plan, eligible Microsoft 365 licensed admins can head to the Microsoft 365 admin center to check for availability.
