{"id":224980,"date":"2026-03-17T00:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T04:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/gartner-suggests-friday-afternoon-copilot-ban-the-register\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T11:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T15:00:16","slug":"gartner-suggests-friday-afternoon-copilot-ban-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/gartner-suggests-friday-afternoon-copilot-ban-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban \u2022 The Register<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/17\/gartner_copilot_security_mitigations\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-17 00:37:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.theregister.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft\u2019s Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output.<\/p>\n

Xu, a Gartner research vice-president, offered the advice at the end of a talk titled \u201cMitigating the Top 5 Microsoft 365 Copilot Security Risks\u201d at the firm\u2019s Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

He raised the possibility of a Friday afternoon AI ban when advising on the fifth risk he has identified: Copilot producing output that is toxic because while it may be factually correct it is culturally unacceptable either in the workplace or among customers. Xu recommended mitigating Copilot\u2019s tendency to produce toxic content by enabling the filters Microsoft supplies, and by training users to always validate the tool\u2019s output.<\/p>\n

The analyst reminded the audience that all Copilot output isn\u2019t fit for sharing without review, making validation necessary for all users at all times. He suggested Friday afternoons are a time when workers might just want to get the job done and won\u2019t bother to check for errors that Microsoft\u2019s chatbot produces, perhaps making that slice of the working week a fine time to ban use of Copilot.<\/p>\n

Xu\u2019s talk ran for 30 minutes, and he spent the first 20 discussing the risk of Copilot exposing content whose creators didn\u2019t set appropriate sharing permissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cCopilot makes over-shared documents more accessible,\u201d he warned. \u201cThis is not a net new risk, but a known risk amplified by AI.\u201d Xu explained why with the example of a worker who uses Copilot to search for information about organizational changes receiving a response that includes a confidential document about an imminent re-org.<\/p>\n

Xu said such results are possible because Copilot…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban \u2022 The Register https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/17\/gartner_copilot_security_mitigations\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-17 00:37:00 Source…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224981,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2026\/03\/17\/shutterstock_yawning_at_work.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-224980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224982,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224980\/revisions\/224982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}