Microsoft introduces Scout, an always-on AI assistant for Microsoft 365

In short: Microsoft has announced Scout, a new always-on AI assistant for work that connects across Microsoft 365 apps and is built on the OpenClaw project.

What happened

Microsoft is launching Microsoft Scout, which it calls its “first real personal assistant.” Scout is designed for businesses and plugs into Microsoft 365 tools such as Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft says Scout can help employees with everyday tasks like organizing calendars, drafting emails, doing expense reports, booking travel, and filling out forms. Unlike Microsoft Copilot, which mostly works inside individual apps, Scout is meant to work more like a helper that can look across your work life and suggest what to do next.

Scout can also use information like your calendar and local road traffic to recommend when you should leave for an appointment. Microsoft says it can learn what is important by reading Teams threads, meeting transcripts, and emails in the background, similar to how a human assistant learns your habits over time.

Microsoft is starting with a desktop preview for “Frontier” customers in the US this week. The company says a more limited preview will expand to a small number of customers in the coming months, before a broader cloud version (run on Microsoft’s servers, like a service you log into) becomes available.

Microsoft says more than 3,000 employees already use Scout internally. The company is also contributing to OpenClaw, which is an open-source project (software code that anyone can inspect and build on).

Why it matters

Tools like Scout could reduce time spent on routine work, but they also raise privacy and security questions because they may need access to emails, chats, and documents. Microsoft says it runs OpenClaw in a “sandbox” (a sealed-off area, like a test kitchen) and treats it as untrusted so it cannot directly access Microsoft 365 data.

Source: The Verge AI