Abstract In this paper, we study connections between positive entropy phenomena and the Koopman representation for actions of general countable groups. Following the line of work initiated by Hayes for sofic entropy, we show in a certain precise manner that all positive entropy must come from portions of the Koopman representation that embed into the left-regular representation. We conclude that for actions having completely positive outer entropy, the Koopman representation must be isomorphic to the countable direct sum of the left-regular representation. This generalizes a theorem of Dooley–Golodets for countable amenable groups. As a final consequence, we observe that actions with completely positive outer entropy must be mixing, and when the group is non-amenable they must be strongly ergodic and have spectral gap.