An AI assistant can arrive already switched on for adults

The classroom note

An IT administrator opening a school's admin console this term often finds a generative AI assistant already listed as an available service, sometimes partly switched on, before anyone in the building has discussed whether to use it. Reading what each platform's own admin documentation states about defaults, age and data, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, turns that discovery into a specific set of settings to check rather than a general worry.

What the evidence says

Google's own admin documentation states its Gemini app is "available to all users over age 18" by default once a qualifying licence exists, and that "conversation history is on by default," with retention only changed if an administrator holding the "Gemini Settings" privilege alters it. Microsoft's enterprise data protection documentation makes a narrower, different kind of claim: prompts, responses and data drawn from Microsoft Graph "aren't used to train foundation models," a data-use commitment rather than a statement about who has access by default. OpenAI's help centre article on ChatGPT for Teachers describes a third pattern: nothing switches on until a verified educator creates a workspace and an admin invites colleagues, at which point shared information "is not used to train our models by default," offered free "through June 2028" for verified US K-12 staff.

The implementation question

Three vendors, three different starting points for the same underlying decision. Google's is a default-on, age-gated model that an administrator must actively narrow; Microsoft's public documentation centres on a data-training promise rather than describing default access; OpenAI's requires an administrator's invitation before anything is available at all. Switching a feature on responsibly means checking, specifically for the product in front of you: is it currently on or off for students as well as staff; what age threshold, if any, applies; how long is conversation or prompt data kept; and what changes, in price or access, once any stated free period ends.

What holds and what fails

What holds: each vendor publishes something concrete and checkable - an age threshold, a retention period, a training-data statement, an expiry date - which is more than a marketing page usually offers. What fails: assuming a default from one product in a vendor's suite applies to another, since a single company's own documentation can describe one feature as on by default and a neighbouring one as off by default within the same console. This is an editorial checklist built from admin documentation, not a settings guide for any specific school's tenancy.

• Is this feature currently on or off by default for students, and separately for staff?
• What does the vendor's own documentation say about using prompts or submissions to train models?
• If access is free or discounted now, what does the documentation say happens when that period ends?

An admin console is not a policy document, but the settings inside it are real decisions. Checking the vendor's own stated defaults, before a feature reaches a classroom, is cheaper than discovering them afterward.