Microsoft Teams has gained a new control that lets you keep unwanted guests out of your meetings — this time in the form of software. The collaboration platform now offers an option to automatically block external bots from joining your meetings, giving hosts and administrators a cleaner, more predictable meeting environment.
Here’s what you need to know about the change, who it affects, and how to turn it on.
What changed in Teams
The update adds a setting that lets you prevent bots originating outside your organization from participating in Teams meetings. Previously, if an external bot was invited or configured to join a session, it could show up and act without much friction. Now, there’s a dedicated option to block that behavior automatically.
This builds on the broader set of meeting controls Microsoft has layered into Teams over recent years. The platform already gives hosts tools to manage guests, recording, and who can present — but bot access has historically been a looser area. Bots are small programs that can post messages, run commands, and pull data during a meeting, and they’re often used for legitimate integrations. The new setting simply lets you draw a harder line around who can participate.
From the way Microsoft frames the change, the goal is to give organizations finer control over meeting participation without forcing them to give up bots entirely. It’s a targeted restriction aimed squarely at the external variety.
Why external bots matter
Bots in Teams fall into two broad categories. Internal bots are created by or approved within your own organization, while external bots come from partner apps, third-party services, or other tenants. Many teams rely on external bots for things like ticketing, monitoring dashboards, or pulling in outside data.
The concern is that those same integrations can introduce risk. An external bot joining a meeting can read chat history, post messages, or trigger actions tied to its connected accounts. For organizations that care about data boundaries, having a single switch to cut off that access — without disabling bots entirely — is a meaningful refinement.
It’s worth noting the distinction between bots and guests. Guests are people from other organizations who’ve been invited in; bots are automated participants. This new setting targets only the automated side, so it won’t affect how you handle human guest access.
How the setting works
The control lives within Teams meeting policy settings, which means it’s primarily an administrative lever rather than something every end user toggles on their own. Admins can apply it organization-wide or to specific groups, and it slots in alongside other meeting-related policies.
In practice, this means an administrator can decide that no external bot should ever join a meeting in their environment, while still allowing internal bots and normal guest access to proceed. The distinction matters: you’re not locking down guests or people, just the automated participants from outside your tenant.
Because it’s policy-driven, the setting can be enforced consistently across a whole organization rather than relying on individual hosts to remember to adjust it each time.
What this means for you
If you’re a regular participant, you probably won’t notice a difference — unless a meeting previously had an unexpected external bot showing up. For most people, the change is invisible, which is the point: the protection works in the background.
If you’re an admin or someone who runs frequent meetings, this gives you a cleaner tool for managing meeting security. You no longer have to guess whether an external integration might slip into a session. And for organizations with strict data-governance requirements, it closes a gap that previously had to be handled through more manual workarounds.
How to get it
The feature rolls out through Microsoft’s normal update cadence for Teams, so it should reach organizations as Microsoft ships it. Because it’s tied to meeting policies, the actual configuration happens in the Teams admin center, where administrators manage policy assignments.
If you’re an admin wanting to enable it, head to the Teams admin center and look for the meeting policy settings related to bots. If you can’t find it yet, it may still be rolling out to your tenant — Microsoft typically stages these changes rather than flipping them on for everyone at once. If you’re a regular user and want the protection, ask your IT team to apply the setting to your meeting policies.
Source: Neowin
Over to you: Do you rely on external bots in your Teams meetings, or would you block them entirely?
