Personalize Copilot to Make it Better for You

A July 14 Microsoft Technical Community post introduces “Copilot Memory,” a new feature that Microsoft claims makes Copilot smarter and “more in tune with how you work” by remembering key facts about how a user likes to work. In other words, the feature allows people to personalize Copilot so that they don’t need to repeat instructions about how Copilot should respond to their prompts.

Copilot memory is also covered in message center notification MC1127234 (1 August 2025), which says that general availability should be in September 2025. That conflicts with the original post, which says that “Memory in Copilot will be generally available in July 2025” and notes that the feature is enabled by default.

Adding to Copilot Memory

Fortune favors the brave, so I fired up Copilot Chat (BizChat) and used the suggested method to capture a memory. Copilot responded with “memory updated” (Figure 1).

Selecting the settings option in Copilot’s […] menu duly revealed a personalization section featuring Copilot memory. I added a couple more observations to build out some instructions for Copilot (Figure 2). Interestingly, Copilot combined some of my instructions to make them more concise.

This screen is also where a user can disable Copilot memory or delete individual or all memories.

The work profile tab showed that Copilot had taken note of my job title and location, both sourced from my Entra ID account properties.

Using Copilot Memory

With some memories in place, I created a very simple prompt for Copilot to respond to by asking it to create a list of Entra ID users with PowerShell. In Figure 3, you can see that Copilot included the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK in its response because it’s covered by one of the memories that I captured.

Graph Option to Manage Copilot Memory for a Tenant

In their July 14 post, Microsoft promised user and tenant options to manage Copilot memory. Individual user control is mentioned above. Tenant-level control is enabled using the Enhanced Personalization Graph resource type. Interacting with the resource requires the PeopleSettings.ReadWrite.All permission and the signed-in user must hold at least the People administrator role. The default setting is revealed as follows after running the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet to connect to the Graph:

$Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/copilot/settings/people/enhancedpersonalization"
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method Get -Uri $Uri

Name                           Value
----                           -----
isEnabledInOrganization        True
disabledForGroup

These settings tell us that Copilot memory is enabled for the organization, and no restrictions apply. To update the settings to disable Copilot memory for everyone, you patch the resource with a payload containing the new settings:

$Settings = @"
{
  "isEnabledInOrganization": false,
}
"@
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method Patch -Uri $Uri -Body $Settings

Name                           Value
----                           -----
isEnabledInOrganization        False
disabledForGroup

After a short period, Copilot memory is disabled for user accounts (Figure 4).

But let’s assume that you want some people to be able to use Copilot memory and not others. In this case, create an Entra ID (security) group and pass its details in the payload. This example reenables Copilot memory for the tenant and adds a group of restricted users:

$GroupId = (Get-MgGroup -Filter "displayName eq 'Users disabled for Copilot Memory'").Id
$Settings = @"
{
  "isEnabledInOrganization": true,
  "disabledForGroup": "$GroupId"}
"@

Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method Patch -Uri $Uri -Body $Settings

More Personalization Makes Copilot Better

Microsoft obviously hopes that personalization will make Copilot more attractive to users. Another example of this strategy in action is the Prioritize My Inbox option to give Copilot instructions about how to filter email. I’m a big fan of removing the need to repeat myself, which is essentially what these options do, so I think they add value. Whether others agree and choose to use Copilot instead of ChatGPT or another competitor remains to be seen.

Support the work of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Your support pays for the time we need to track, analyze, and document the changing world of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Only humans contribute to our work! Not even Copilot can help us figure out some of the intricacies of Microsoft 365.