Is there any risk of confidential data appearing during a Windows laptop reset?

I need to provide a clear, definitive answer to a concern raised by non‑technical managers.

The environment is fully cloud‑based: Intune, Autopilot, OneDrive, SharePoint, M365, encrypted local copies, and users trained not to store local data.

Is there any real risk of confidential data(*) appearing on screen during the reconditioning of a laptop (re-imaging or AutoPilot reset) for device reassignment?

1. Have you ever seen sensitive information appear on screen during such operations?

2. Can a device reset cause data from the previous user to reappear?

I’m not asking about internal procedures — only whether, in such a cloud‑only scenario, a reset could display any previous user data on screen at any point during the process.

I’m turning to the community for two reasons:

1. My own explanation isn’t being given much weight.

2. I want to make sure I’m not overlooking any unusual situation.

(*) By “confidential data”, I mean user‑generated content such as documents, emails, cached files, or anything belonging to the previous user.

reconditioning of a laptop (re-imaging or AutoPilot reset)

This will completely clear the hard drive. Even if it was not BitLocked before (and it should have been), nothing will remain after the operation.

The only way you could access data on a device without having user or administrative access to it would be to boot it in Recovery Mode and hope the drive was not BitLocked (or bypass BitLocker using one of the several ways this is possible).

Anyway, a re-imaging, end even more a full AutoPilot reset, will never show on screen whatever was on the device before.

Now, if the laptop had an additional disk (or a USB drive), that would be a completely different matter. Those data would not be touched and could still be available after (unless they were encrypted).

But for a standard laptop with a single hard drive, you can be completely sure that everything will be cleared and nothing will ever be accessible again.