Factory SOP Copilot hits security questions

This looks like a small productivity experiment, but in a manufacturing environment it is really a test of how safely the company handles operational knowledge, permissions, and AI-generated guidance.

• –Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot stays within the Microsoft 365 service boundary and honors existing SharePoint permissions, which means overshared folders and broken inheritance are a bigger risk than classic external exposure.
• –SharePoint-grounded assistants can still return incomplete, outdated, or overconfident answers, and Microsoft explicitly says AI in SharePoint should not be relied on for high-risk professional decisions without human review.
• –"Not on the internet" is only partly true here: Copilot is still a cloud service, and if web search features are enabled, derived queries can leave the tenant boundary to Bing.
• –A document-based SOP assistant also inherits AI-native risks like indirect prompt injection, where malicious instructions embedded in files or pages can manipulate responses or leak context.
• –For a critical manufacturer, the sensible rollout is a narrow pilot with a dedicated SharePoint library, least-privilege access, sensitivity labels, audit logging, and no direct connection to production control networks.