Microsoft has introduced Microsoft Scout, a new AI agent designed to work continuously across Microsoft 365 and Teams rather than waiting for one-off prompts. The company says the product is meant to help manage follow-through on work, not just answer questions.
Scout is the first agent in a new category Microsoft calls Autopilots. According to the company, these agents remain active in the background, use their own identity, and can take action on a user's behalf within the permissions set by the individual and their organization. Microsoft says the goal is to keep work moving even when a user is focused elsewhere.
The company is positioning Scout as part of Microsoft 365's broader push to make AI more operational in daily work. Scout connects with Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint, and it draws from chats, email, calendar entries and contacts. Microsoft says users interact with the agent in Teams, while a desktop app extends its reach to browsers, local resources and model context protocol servers.
Microsoft says Scout can handle coordination tasks that often consume time during the day. Those include finding meeting times across time zones, highlighting important meetings, preparing materials ahead of time and flagging upcoming deliverables. The company also says the agent can block calendar time automatically and identify risks such as stalled decisions before they become larger problems.
Microsoft is emphasizing that Scout is built for enterprise use from the start. The company says the agent uses Microsoft 365's identity and access controls, and that each agent operates under a governed Entra identity rather than a shared service account. Microsoft says that makes the work attributable to a known actor already recognized by a company's directory.
The company also says credentials are protected throughout the process, with access scoped to the task at hand and credentials redacted from logs and diagnostics. In addition, Microsoft says Scout respects existing data protection policies, including sensitivity labels and data loss prevention rules from Microsoft Purview. Sensitive actions can require human approval before they proceed.
Microsoft says Scout is powered by OpenClaw open-source technology, and that it is contributing policy conformance work back to the OpenClaw project. The company says that organizations using OpenClaw will be able to validate whether their environment meets security and compliance requirements and receive an audit-ready answer.
Microsoft says employees have already been testing an early desktop version of Scout internally. The company says that early use has helped it see how an always-on agent can take on coordination work and surface risks earlier.
The experience is now being offered to a limited set of customers through private preview and to Frontier organizations. Microsoft describes Frontier as an experimental release track that lets customers try the product in their own workflows.
Access requires Frontier enrollment, Intune policy setup and an opt-in attestation, according to Microsoft. Users with a GitHub Copilot license can then download and install the software.
Scout arrives as Microsoft continues to expand its agent strategy across Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Teams platform. The company is presenting it as a step toward software that can do more than assist in the moment, instead maintaining context and carrying work forward over time.