Welcome back. This month's edition is about control and confidence: a Copilot assistant that guides admins through configuration, significantly expanded control over how employee data is retained and removed, and a simpler sign-in path for organizations operating across cloud boundaries. Inside, you'll find what's newly available, an early look at what's coming next, and the latest thinking to help you measure what matters across your employee experience strategy.
New on your Viva Glint platform
This section highlights new capabilities now available to help you strengthen Copilot experiences, administrative control, and data quality in Viva Glint.
Expanded admin controls for user-delete data handling. We're continuing to expand control over the employee data lifecycle. Admins can now choose to retain a user's email address and employee ID after that user is removed from Glint, preserving historical reporting accuracy. Deletion now honors the configuration values in effect at the exact time of deletion, making outcomes more predictable. In response to direct customer feedback, an employee ID or email address can also be reused after a user has been permanently deleted. Alongside this release, processing of live Microsoft Entra delete signals, and previously unprocessed delete signals will begin on October 1, 2026. Delete user data from Viva Glint | Microsoft Learn
Glint integration with Microsoft 365 Organizational Data Service | Public Preview Enhancements. For customers using Microsoft 365 Organizational Data Service, we've introduced several enhancements that strengthen Viva Glint's integration with the Microsoft 365 data ecosystem. Case-insensitive attribute handling now enables consistent attribute naming across Microsoft 365 applications, regardless of capitalization. This helps prevent common data quality issues such as duplicate attributes appearing in reports and filters due to inconsistencies in upstream systems. The result is a more reliable and streamlined data management experience. We've also enhanced manager hierarchy processing to align with common organizational data practices. Glint can now identify top-level leaders either when the manager ID is left blank or when an employee's .manager ID matches their own employee ID. This provides greater flexibility in representing organizational structures and improves compatibility with a wider range of HR data sources. Consuming data from Organizational data in Microsoft 365 into Viva Glint | Microsoft Learn
Copilot in Viva Glint and cross-tenant guest users. Copilot features in Viva Glint no longer appear for Microsoft Entra cross-tenant guest users. Copilot in Viva Glint relies on Microsoft Copilot large language model services, and those services don't support guest users today, so guest users were seeing errors instead of results. This is a backend service limitation rather than a licensing or policy one, so it applies even where your Viva Feature Access Management policy turns Copilot on. All other Viva Glint functionality is unchanged for guest users.
Coming soon to Viva Glint
The following section offers an early look at capabilities coming to Glint. These updates are shaping the future of Copilot experiences, action-taking, feature discovery, and enterprise-scale data integration.
Copilot-supported commenting for survey takers | Generally available in September. Viva Glint survey participants will be able to use a streamlined Copilot experience to rewrite all or part of their open-text responses. By helping respondents refine their feedback and reduce distinctive writing styles, this experience can increase comfort and perceived privacy, encouraging greater participation, longer responses, and more candid comments.
Viva Glint Admin Assistant, powered by Copilot | Generally available in September. This first phase delivers an in-product Copilot experience grounded in Microsoft documentation and best practices. It guides administrators through configuration tasks with contextual, step-by-step help. Selecting the Copilot entry point opens a familiar slide-out conversational panel, reducing the need to search through documentation mid-task. Coaching and action-taking capabilities are planned for future phases.
Survey-taking experience | Generally available in September. Three improvements will give survey takers more control and make the experience more predictable. Open-text comments will save automatically as they are typed, helping preserve feedback if someone steps away, loses their connection, or closes the browser. When survey takers update an earlier answer, the survey will remain on that question instead of jumping back to the end. A single “Next” button will also replace the separate “Skip” action, providing a clearer and more consistent way to move through the survey. These changes will roll out automatically, including to surveys already in progress, and require no configuration or admin action. Together, they will reduce friction and lost responses while supporting better completion rates and higher-quality comment feedback.
Streamlined sign-in for cross-cloud users | Generally available in September. Users signing in to their Glint instances cross-cloud (whether from a US Government cloud tenant to another commercial instance or users accessing specific Glint instances) will be able to reach their Viva Glint environment through a tenant-specific URL that recognizes their domain automatically. What previously took roughly seven steps will only take one or two. This is a meaningful daily improvement for organizations operating across cloud boundaries. For more information visit Invite Government Cloud users to your Viva Glint tenant | Microsoft Learn.
Advanced Configuration Uploads, Retroactive Updates Deprecation | Deprecating in September. To streamline retroactive updates, the uploads-based version of Advanced Configuration is being deprecated. We recommend using the new wizard version available on the Survey Programs page, which offers a simpler, more intuitive experience that requires zero file uploads. Learn more here.
Action taking analysis report | Public Preview in September/October. A long-requested capability for listening program leaders will provide a report showing which leaders and managers have accessed their survey results and whether they've gone on to take action, such as holding team conversations. Instead of guessing whether results are landing, program owners will be able to see engagement directly and target support where follow-through is lagging.
In-product feature announcements | Generally available in September. Admins will see a new announcements entry point in the Viva Glint header, bringing feature news into the product itself. This first phase connects admins directly to the Viva Glint Tech Community blog, where they can subscribe and receive updates by email. Richer in-product announcements are planned for later phases.
Modern data platform enhancements | Generally available in September. Several improvements will arrive together for customers using Viva Glint's modern data platform: clearer in-platform visibility into Glint ingestion outcomes on the validation page, a unified audit log, a common ingestion identifier for easier traceability, and expanded support for additional tenant configurations. Together, these improvements will make it faster to confirm that data has landed as expected and easier to troubleshoot when it hasn't.
Survey authors own their survey results | Private preview. Survey administrators, also known as survey authors, will gain direct access to reports for the surveys they own. They will also be able to administer key parts of the survey setup. This will reduce dependence on central admins and help teams close the loop on their own programs faster. This capability will enter private preview with the August release, with broader availability to follow.
Continuous engagement: connect survey questions to how work happens | Private preview. Admins will be able to map any survey question to Viva Insights work-pattern metrics and select Copilot metrics. For example, when managers view their survey results for an AI-related question, they can view Copilot usage signals alongside the survey results for each team. Admins must currently raise a support request to configure these mappings, with plans to make it directly configurable in the admin experience in October. If you'd like to try this capability in private preview, reach out to your account team. Learn more here.
See our public roadmap for more feature updates.
Events and learning opportunities
Stay up to date with recent documentation enhancements and resources designed to help you get more value from Viva Glint and Viva Pulse.
Recent Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) sessions
August 13th – Viva Glint Vision, Strategy & Roadmap: Second Half 2026
In this recent EECC session, we shared Viva Glint vision, strategy, and roadmap for the second half of 2026. The forum brought customers together to explore how AI is reshaping employee listening, review upcoming investments, and provide feedback on concepts designed to strengthen action taking, demonstrate impact, and improve listening-team efficiency.
The session covered Glint’s five product tenets, upcoming Copilot and reporting capabilities, and early concepts such as the Manager Action-Taking Agent and Employee Feedback Agent. Participants also discussed adoption challenges with existing Focus Areas functionality, the need for company-specific context in AI-supported action planning, and opportunities to improve release communication, testing, support pathways, and reporting defaults.
Key takeaways from the discussion included:
- Action taking remains a top customer priority, but foundational usability improvements to Focus Areas are needed to increase manager adoption.
- Customers welcomed the Manager Action-Taking Agent concept and emphasized the importance of incorporating organizational context, internal programs, approved solutions, and centralized reporting.
- Copilot-assisted commenting generated interest alongside requests for evidence that it preserves employee intent, plus granular administrative controls.
- Customers valued planned investments in reporting, Copilot metrics, and listening-team efficiency, while also requesting clearer release timelines and a safe environment for testing upcoming capabilities.
- Additional opportunities include stronger customer community and support channels, configurable report defaults, survey-reset functionality, and deeper Microsoft Teams integration.
If you are not yet a member of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) but would like to participate in upcoming sessions and gain access to other engaging and valuable Glint and Pulse customer activities, please sign-up using this form.
August 27th – Voice, Trust, and AI: The Development and Evaluation of Copilot Rewrite and the Employee Feedback Agent
Target Audience: HR leaders, employee listening practitioners, people analytics professionals, and Viva Glint administrators
We invited EECC customers to a discussion of the research, design decisions, and evaluation approach behind Copilot Rewrite and the Employee Feedback Agent (EFA), two experiences that bring AI into the feedback process while preserving employee voice and psychological safety. The session drew 38 live attendees representing 49 customer organizations.
The discussion covered how each experience was designed to reduce friction, what the team is learning from early use, and how outcomes such as trust, authenticity, and feedback quality are being evaluated. It was a candid, Q&A-driven session, with customers weighing in on administrative controls, use cases, and roadmap priorities.
Key takeaways:
- Copilot Rewrite is on track for general availability at the end of September for all survey types except 360s, gated by its own off-by-default administrative control. Customers welcomed the separate, opt-in toggle and asked about comment character limits and accessibility testing.
- The Employee Feedback Agent's multi-turn, probing conversations produced 2.6 times more unique themes than prompted campaigns and twice as many actionable insights as static survey comments, with 79% of internal testers reporting a positive experience.
- Customers asked for broader reporting access beyond admins, clearer timelines to general availability, and ways to keep conversational data comparable across business units without losing nuance. Several also asked about embedding EFA within existing engagement or exit surveys.
Recent documentation enhancements
Viva Glint Action Planning Content Update
Create Focus Areas in Viva Glint
We're making updates to the Viva Glint action planning content to ensure managers have a seamless experience without broken links or expired content.
What's changing:
- LinkedIn Learning videos: Following an audit of the LinkedIn Learning videos embedded in Viva Glint, we have identified 31 videos to be retained and will remove references to any videos that are no longer relevant/will no longer be available.
- External links: Third-party content links are being replaced with current Microsoft resources (e.g., WorkLabs, People Science articles).
All Action Plan Templates remain available, and People Science-curated best-practice guidance remains at the core of every Action Plan Template. Changes will roll out in the coming weeks.
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