Turning off mining for a team stops Optimize from capturing new workflow data from that team's participants going forward. It's an org-level admin action, done per-team from the Workflow Mining settings and it should be treated as a durable on/off, not something toggled casually.
This is different from a participant individually pausing their own mining, this is an admin-level, team-wide switch.
Who can do this
Only System Admins have access to the Workflow Mining settings page where this control lives. Org Optimizers and Team Optimizers do not have access to toggle mining on/off — this is a System Admin–only action.
How it's done
Go to Settings → Workflow Mining.
Click into the Team mining controls tab (this was split out from the main mining setup as a separate tab specifically to house the per-team toggle) to turn mining on for a team, you must go to the team mining controls tab to toggle mining on/off.
Select the team and toggle mining off.
Good to know:
This is not meant to be toggled casually. Switching mining on/off repeatedly for a team is advised against: background capture is designed to capture large recurring patterns and is not meant for capturing a few actions and then being turned off shortly after — this could lead to data loss.
It doesn't override individual participant pauses, and vice versa.