Enabling and restricting Copilot: consent settings and data residency

What it does

Three consent settings decide whether Copilot works in Customer Insights - Data, whether your data can leave its geography to reach an Azure OpenAI deployment, and whether Microsoft may review prompts and outputs to improve the service. Two live in Customer Insights, one only in the Power Platform admin center.

Key facts

The Customer Insights settings sit under Settings > System > Consent. That's one tab, easy to miss, and it's where every Copilot conversation with a client ends up.
Enable Copilot features powered by Azure OpenAI — default On. Turning it off disables all Copilot and generative AI features in the app for everyone. Requires the Customer Insights - Data admin role.
Allow cross-geography data flow for Copilot features — default On and not changeable in the United States and Switzerland, where the Azure OpenAI deployment is local. Default Off everywhere else. Also admin-only.
In US and Switzerland environments the cross-geography field isn't displayed at all, because it's already on and can't be altered. Its absence is not a bug.
Allow data sharing for Copilot features — default Off. Lets Microsoft capture and review inputs, outputs and telemetry to improve models and services. It cannot be edited inside Customer Insights - Data; you set it in the Power Platform admin center and you need a Power Platform admin to do it.
Consent is tenant-wide and applies to all users and all Copilot features. There is no per-feature or per-user switch.
Documented Copilot region availability for Customer Insights - Data is the United States and Switzerland. Outside those, cross-geography consent is what makes Copilot available at all.
Copilot does not share data across environments — that's stated in Microsoft's responsible AI FAQs for the individual features.
The Copilot capabilities gated by these settings are all currently preview: segment creation, dialog with data, and the docs-based help pane Q&A.
Admins can revoke consent at any time, and revoking it takes the features away immediately for everyone.

When to use / skip

There's no skipping this one — every Customer Insights - Data delivery has to land somewhere on it, if only by leaving the defaults alone. The real question is whether you make it an explicit decision with the client or let it happen by omission.

Make it explicit. The default state is "Copilot on, cross-geography flow off unless you're in the US or Switzerland, Microsoft not reviewing your prompts", which is a defensible default for most clients. But a UK or EU client running in a European geography will find Copilot missing and nobody will know why, because nothing in the UI says "you need to consent to cross-geography data flow". Put it on the agenda in the design phase rather than discovering it three days before a demo.

For a regulated client — financial services, health, public sector — treat the cross-geography setting as a formal approval, not a checkbox. It means customer data processed outside the compliance boundary or national cloud. That conversation involves their DPO, and it takes weeks, not minutes.

Configuration decisions

Whether Copilot stays enabled at all in this tenant, and whether that's a security team decision or a functional one.
For non-US/Switzerland environments, whether to grant cross-geography data flow — a compliance decision requiring a named owner and, usually, a documented assessment.
Whether to turn on data sharing for quality improvement, and who holds the Power Platform admin role needed to do it.
Who holds the Customer Insights - Data admin role, given that role is the only thing standing between an individual and switching Copilot off for the whole tenant.
How you communicate consent state to end users, so people stop raising tickets asking where the Copilot icon went.
Whether the client's change control needs consent settings captured as configuration, since they're not part of any solution or exportable artefact.

Gotchas

Consent is tenant-wide, so a sandbox and a production environment in the same tenant do not get separate answers. You cannot pilot Copilot in a dev environment and leave production untouched.
The data sharing setting living in a different admin centre catches everyone. A Customer Insights admin looking for it in the Consent tab will not find it and may conclude it doesn't exist.
Turning off the master Copilot setting is silent from the user's point of view. Features simply aren't there. There's no message explaining why.
Region availability and consent are two separate constraints that look like one. Being in a supported region means you don't need cross-geography consent; being outside it means consent alone may not be enough if the capability hasn't rolled out to your geography yet.
None of these settings travel with a solution import. Move an environment, rebuild a tenant, or spin up a new environment and you check them again by hand.
"Copilot is enabled" doesn't mean any given capability is available to a given user — dialog with data still needs Admin or Contributor permissions on top, and unified data behind it.

Consultant notes

Ask for the environment region and the tenant's Copilot consent state during discovery, in writing. It determines whether half of this category is even demonstrable.
Give the client a one-page description of the three settings in plain terms — what each one does, what data goes where, what the default is. Their security review will ask, and having it ready saves a week.
When a client says "turn Copilot off", check which of the three they actually mean. Nine times out of ten they mean the data sharing setting, which is already off.
Don't promise Copilot capabilities in a European or UK-hosted environment without confirming both the region rollout and the client's willingness to allow cross-geography processing. That's the commonest way to write a cheque you can't cash on this product.
Before go-live, screenshot the Consent tab and file it with the environment build documentation. It is invisible configuration and it will be questioned at some point.

Worth another look if Microsoft adds Azure OpenAI regions for this workload, or moves the data sharing setting back into the app.