Risk Intelligence
Copilot Risk Scenarios
Real failure scenarios we've observed in enterprise Copilot deployments. Know the risks before you expose your organization.
Assess Your Risk73%
of tenants have uncontrolled “Everyone” permissions
60%
of Copilot licenses go unused within 90 days
45%
of SharePoint sites lack proper sensitivity labeling
2-4
weeks to complete a readiness assessment
Documented Failures
Risk Scenarios
These are not hypotheticals. These are real scenarios observed in enterprise Copilot deployments.
Data Exposure via Oversharing
Scenario: An employee asks Copilot "What is the CEO salary?" and receives the actual compensation data because the HR SharePoint site has "Everyone" permissions.
Impact: Confidential compensation, M&A documents, legal matters, and HR complaints surface to unauthorized employees.
Prevention
Permissions audit, sensitivity labels, SharePoint access governance.
AI Hallucination in Critical Decisions
Scenario: Copilot generates a contract summary that includes incorrect payment terms. The sales team relies on this summary and misprices a deal.
Impact: Financial losses, customer disputes, legal exposure from AI-generated errors.
Prevention
User training on AI limitations, human review requirements for high-stakes content.
Permissions Sprawl Amplification
Scenario: Years of ad-hoc SharePoint site creation have created sprawling permissions. Copilot indexes all accessible content, making discovery trivial.
Impact: Users can now find content they technically had access to but never knew existed.
Prevention
Comprehensive permissions audit before Copilot deployment, ongoing access reviews.
Attorney-Client Privilege Breach
Scenario: Copilot summarizes documents from the Legal department SharePoint site in response to a non-legal employee query.
Impact: Privileged communications lose protection, creating legal exposure in litigation.
Prevention
Legal department sites excluded from Copilot, sensitivity labels for privileged content.
Retention Policy Violation
Scenario: Copilot surfaces content from documents that should have been deleted under retention policies but were never purged.
Impact: Regulatory compliance failures, discoverable content in litigation that should not exist.
Prevention
Retention policy enforcement audit, purge of expired content before Copilot enablement.
eDiscovery Expansion
Scenario: Copilot-generated content (summaries, drafts, responses) becomes discoverable in litigation, expanding the scope of legal holds.
Impact: Increased eDiscovery costs, unexpected content preservation requirements.
Prevention
Legal department guidance on Copilot usage, eDiscovery workflow updates.
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