When you have tested devices and need to deliver the hardware back, you need to remove the device from your Autopilot service in Intune so the device can be reused. It is the same when you have had a Autopilot device in your tenant for the company hardware life time – you need to remove the device from you Autopilot service.
Companies has been use to do this for Apple DEP devices for the last many years, but now we also need a procedure for getting our Windows devices out of our management system if the device needs to be reused or sold to a broker so the devices not ending up in your company Azure Active Directory tenant again.

First of all when we just are removing the device from Autopilot in Intune it will fail.

In the Microsoft 365 Device Management portal :
Device enrollment – Windows Enrollment – Windows Autopilot devices

When you mark the device you want to delete – and click delete

It will failed to delete device records.

This is do to that the device still exist in Intune.

You need to find the device in Intune All devices and click delete

In my case I have just redeployed the device and there for there a two Intune objects for the same device – all devices with that serial number needs to be deleted.

When you delete the device in Intune it will prevent you from logging in to the device afterwards

Then you can delete the device in Device enrollment – Windows Enrollment – Windows Autopilot devices