Summary: Microsoft Teams will detect and label external meeting assistant bots that join meetings, giving organizers the ability to approve, deny, or remove them. A new admin policy will manage bot handling, with detection enabled by default starting mid-May to mid-June 2026. This enhances security and compliance visibility.
Introduction
AI‑powered meeting assistant bots—such as transcription and summarization services—are increasingly used to enhance productivity in online meetings. While these tools can be valuable, some bots may access meetings without the meeting organizer’s or the hosting tenant’s knowledge or consent, creating data security, privacy, and compliance risks.
To help organizations protect meeting content and increase visibility into automated participants, Microsoft Teams is introducing a new capability that detects external meeting assistant bots as they attempt to join meetings. This update gives organizers greater awareness and control and provides administrators with clear controls to manage how detected bots are handled in meetings hosted across the organization.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 558107.
When will this happen
- Targeted Release: We will begin rolling out in mid-May 2026 and expect to complete by early June 2026.
- General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out in early June 2026 and expect to complete by mid-June 2026.
- General Availability (GCC): We will begin rolling out in early June 2026 and expect to complete by mid-June 2026.
How will this affect your organization
Who is affected
- All organizations using Microsoft Teams meetings, including GCC tenants
- Meeting organizers and Teams administrators
What will happen
- Teams will detect external meeting bots as they attempt to join meetings hosted by your organization.
- When detected, bots will be clearly labeled in the meeting lobby experience.
- Note: There might still be bots that are undetected by the system due to their intrinsic behavior. Please inform your users to report them out directly from the app/meeting. This will help us improve our detection system.
- Organizers will be able to:
- approve or deny detected bots from the meeting lobby.
- See clearly which participants have been identified as bots.
- Remove detected bots during the meeting if necessary.
- These organizer controls are designed to help ensure that bot participation in meetings is an intentional and informed decision.
- A new meeting policy will be available in the Teams admin center that allows admins to configure how detected bots are handled (do not detect bots, require approval). In the future, we intend to provide more granular controls to admins, as appropriate.
- Bot detection will be enabled by default for all tenants.
- Teams will continue improving detection accuracy; however, some bots may not be detected in all scenarios.
What you can do to prepare
No action is required at this time.
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