MC1405498: Microsoft 365 Copilot Simplifies Service Plan Control for Premium and Basic Grounding Experiences

📢 Official Microsoft Message Center Announcement

Updated August 24, 2026: The behavior remap for the Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat service plan described in this post is now complete. Please reference relevant documentation in Using the Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat service plan. Thank you for your patience. 

[What and Why:]

We are simplifying how the Microsoft 365 Copilot service plan controls Copilot experiences to provide a more predictable and manageable admin experience. With this change, the Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat service plan serves as the primary mechanism to determine whether licensed users receive Premium or Basic grounding. Basic grounding is a primarily web-grounded experience with reduced graph grounding in select apps while Premium grounding provides full graph grounding in addition to web-grounded experiences across Copilot endpoints. This change helps facilitate an organization’s ability to stage deployments and align with enterprise expectations for manageability and consistency.

[Rollout Schedule:]

General Availability (Worldwide): We expect to begin rolling out end of August 2026 (previously late July) and expect to complete by end of September 2026 (previously early August).

[Impact on Your Organization:]

Who is affected:

• Admins managing Microsoft 365 Copilot service plans 
• Users assigned a Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial license

What will happen:

• The Copilot service plan will act as a control for Copilot experiences where:
  • Enabled: Licensed users are expected to receive the Premium grounding.
  • Disabled: Licensed users are not expected to receive Premium grounding and will instead have access to Basic grounding.
• Important to note that Personal Content Mode will no longer be activated when the service plan is disabled.
• Users with the service plan disabled will have access to a primarily web-grounded Copilot Chat, with reduced organizational data (Microsoft Graph) grounding in select apps.
• This change improves predictability and consistency of Copilot experiences by reducing scenarios where users may access partial Copilot functionality when the service plan is disabled. There is no change to licensing or SKU configuration; however, the Copilot features available to users may vary based on service plan configuration. The service plan becomes the control for managing Copilot experience access.

[Action Required/Recommendations:]

No immediate action is required, but we recommend that you:

• Review your current Copilot service plan assignments to understand which users may be impacted.
• Identify users or groups currently relying on Personal Content Mode and plan communications about the upcoming change.
• Update any internal documentation and guidance to reflect the simplified on/off behavior.
• Use your existing service plan management approach to control Copilot access.

Learn more:

• What Copilot license do I have | Microsoft Support
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Privacy and Protections | Microsoft Learn
• Use Copilot Chat in Microsoft 365 apps – Microsoft Support
  

Source: Microsoft Message Center • Analysed by MWPro

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