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Will Tenants Allow Recording and Notetaking Bots to Join Teams Meetings?
Message center notification MC1459141 (21 August 2026) announces a new Teams administration policy to control whether Bot recording applications are detected and blocked from joining Teams meetings. Rollout to targeted release tenants is happening now and should be complete worldwide by the end of August. General availability overlaps targeted release and is scheduled to finish by the end of September 2026.
You’ll know if the new control is available when the meeting policy settings shown in the Teams admin center include the option to Manage external bots and their access to meetings (Figure 1).
The setting is also configurable through PowerShell. Here’s how to check and set the control. The first command lists the setting for the global (default) policy. The second sets a custom meeting policy to not detect bots.
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global | Format-List *bot* ExternalBotAccessMode : RequireApprovalWhenDetected Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity 'Allow Meeting Recording' -ExternalBotAccessMode AllowAllBots
As the cmdlet documentation notes, in meetings organized by users assigned the custom meeting policy with the control set to AllowAllBots, “Bots will appear the same as other participants. Standard lobby policies will apply to them. They may get mistakenly admitted to meetings.”
Smarter Bot Detection
Microsoft recognized that allowing users to add recording or notetaking bots to meetings can pose significant compliance and confidentiality problems earlier this year. The initial fix detected attempts by bots to join to give meeting organizers the choice to admit or block the bots.
On June 29, 2026, Microsoft published a technical community blog to announce that smarter bot detection was coming. This is what is now active. Microsoft says that “Teams now uses a combination of behavioral and infrastructure signals to identify bots with a higher degree of accuracy.”
The signals allow Teams to detect and identify bots and place them in the meeting lobby. After that, any meeting participant with the right to admit from the lobby can allow waiting bots to join the meeting, which is one good reason to limit this right to meeting organizers and co-organizers.
What’s really interesting is Microsoft’s introduction of the Teams Bot Identification Program, which allows ISVs to obtain a marker from Microsoft to include when their bots attempt to join calls. According to the blog post, Microsoft has worked with Maestro Labs, Otter.ai, Read AI, and Recall.ai to register their meeting bots and has plans to expand the list.
What Happens When Bots Attempt to Join Meetings
I don’t use ISV bots, so I signed up with Otter.ai to get a free account that I could use for testing. Otter.ai is on Microsoft’s ISV list, so it wasn’t a surprise when the bot showed up as an identified app, waiting in the lobby for admittance (Figure 2).
If Otter.ai wasn’t a recognized bot, Teams would list it as a suspected threat. This category covers “Unregistered or system-identified bots” and is intended to highlight risks to meeting organizers.
Once a recording or notetaking bot shows up, control lies in the hands of the meeting organizer. This is where corporate guidance is necessary to let people know whether the organization is happy to allow meetings hosted by their tenant to be recorded and analyzed by AI applications that operate outside the tenant’s data governance framework.
Some tenants (including Microsoft) have policies to instruct employees not to admit third-party bots to Teams meetings. Others might take a more liberal attitude and regard these apps as helpful, especially if the tenant doesn’t use Microsoft 365 Copilot and therefore cannot use the Microsoft agents and recap functionality.
The problem is more pronounced when external participants attempt to add a bot to a call. I’ve seen many instances of this happening, especially when external advisors participate in meetings. External advisors often want high-quality meeting notes and reasonably argue that the bots replace notes they would otherwise take themselves. In theory, that allows them to pay closer attention to the discussion. No matter what arguments are advanced, the problem remains that confidential company information is leaving the tenant boundary.
New Technology, New Challenges
In some respects, allowing third-party bots into Teams meetings poses the same issue as allowing users to upload documents from SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business for processing by Claude or ChatGPT. Data leaves the control of the tenant to be processed elsewhere. Whether sufficient benefit is derived from that external processing to offset the risk of exposing confidential information is a question every organization must answer for itself.
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