Copilot’s Temporary Chat

Temporary Chat is Copilot’s Response to Similar Features in Other AI Chat Apps

I guess I must have missed the memo about the introduction of temporary chat sessions for Microsoft 365 Copilot (BizChat), but the facility to conduct a chat with Copilot has apparently existed for a couple of months (Figure 1). Temporary chats can be conducted using work or web resource. However, a temporary chat doesn’t seem to be able to use GPT-5 (at least not yet). Perhaps this will be possible when GPT-5 becomes the default by the end of November (MC1176368, last updated 30 October 2025).

A temporary chat is one that doesn’t contribute to the memories maintained by Copilot maintains for normal chats. Similar features are available for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, all of which were added in late summer 2025. According to Microsoft’s Copilot Chat roadmap, temporary chat is in the “being currently being built” category, but that’s likely just outdated documentation.

All of the other tools like citation sources work as expected. The only thing that’s missing is the chat thread that usually stores prompts and responses created during a session. A chat thread (listed under “Conversations”) can be loaded into Copilot chat to continue a conversation. Because the chat thread is discarded once a temporary chat ceases, there’s no way to restart the conversation. If you want to save the results of a temporary chat, use Copilot pages (and optionally edit the results in Word).

According to Copilot, a temporary chat is ideal for brainstorming new ideas, generating draft proposals, or asking confidential questions without having the results captured in a chat thread. Remember that information generated for chat responses can resurface in future Copilot responses saved as a memory or in Copilot pages, so if you want the results of interaction with Copilot to disappear once the session is over, a temporary chat is a good way to achieve the goal.

Interaction Records for Temporary Chats

Although temporary chats disappear from user view and won’t be recycled by Copilot, audit events for the interactions in a temporary chat are still captured in the Microsoft 365 audit log and can be reviewed by administrators using audit log searches, accessing the compliance copies stored in the hidden TeamsMessagesData folder in user mailboxes, or by using the Graph AiInteractionHistory API to retrieve a user’s chat history. In other words, if someone uses temporary chats for a purpose that wouldn’t be approved by the organization, their activity might be detected through an administrative scan of interaction records.

For example, here’s the record for the prompt shown in Figure 2 as captured by the AiInteractionHistory API (the user who submitted the prompt is known because their account identifier is needed to submit the API request):

id               : 1762780547334
sessionId        : 19:VYCrQOrG6IkiZRiJA3uckyFPbKwxjnYSkzS6CkRCyqE1@thread.v2
requestId        : 2c8c0203-15d1-4779-8bc8-2ff277f9e18f
appClass         : IPM.SkypeTeams.Message.Copilot.PrivateChat
interactionType  : userPrompt
conversationType : appchat
etag             : 1762780547334
createdDateTime  : 10/11/2025 13:15:47
locale           : en-us
contexts         : {}
from             : @{@odata.type=#microsoft.graph.chatMessageFromIdentitySet; application=; device=; user=}
body             : @{contentType=text; content=What's happening with Copilot Temporary Chat?}
attachments      : {}
links            : {}
mentions         : {}

The Nature of Recycled Thoughts

I’m not sure when I will ever use a temporary chat, but I’m sure that some will find a use for this feature (apart from kicking the tires, that is). I understand that leaving no trace behind after a chat might be good in some situations. Who wants Copilot to recycle information discussed in a chat? Oh wait, isn’t recycling information what Generative AI’s all about?

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