Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more.Unlike Copilot that lives inside Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do a lot more. “This is a personal assistant, it’s the first real personal assistant we’ve offered customers,” explains Omar Shahine, corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout, in an interview with The Verge. “I think it’s important for customers to understand that you’re going to get a phone call from this assistant, it’s a very different type of AI than chat.”Microsoft Scout can monitor local road traffic and your calendar to recommend the best time to leave for appointments, school pickups, and dinner dates. It also works much like a real assistant, surfacing things that it learns are important to you by reading Teams threads, transcripts, and email in the background.Microsoft is starting off slowly with Scout, and only releasing a desktop preview version to its Frontier customers in the US this week, but the goal is to have this running in the cloud and always on. A more limited preview will be available to a small number of customers in the coming months, before Microsoft rolls out the full cloud version more broadly.The desktop app has already proved popular internally, with more than 3,000 Microsoft employees already using the app. Engineers have been using Scout to schedule meetings, help with paperwork, book travel, and fill out forms. A lot of Microsoft Scout usage is simply staying on top of tasks, whether work related or personal. “A lot of people are using it to just be better versions of themselves. … We all have aspirations we want for ourselves but we just often lose time and can’t do,” says Shahine.Instead of creating a separate version of OpenClaw, Microsoft is contributing directly to the core technology of the open-source project. It’s surprising to see Microsoft embrace OpenClaw just months after CEO Satya Nadella compared the technology to a virus. OpenClaw’s AI “skill” extensions have also been branded a security nightmare. I asked Shahine why Microsoft was now confident it could manage the security and privacy aspects of an AI agent that can access a lot of critical corporate data.“We have a process for intake [of OpenClaw] that makes sure we’re protecting ourselves from things like supply chain risk, and also just breaking changes,” says Shahine. “It’s a very fast-moving open-source project, one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. We operate OpenClaw in a cloud environment that’s in a sandbox, and we treat OpenClaw as untrusted so it doesn’t have secrets or access to any of your Microsoft 365 data.”Microsoft also uses its suite of security capabilities to control OpenClaw, including Agent 365, Purview, and Defender. Then there’s the usual red teaming, privacy reviews, and security reviews to ensure it’s safe for enterprise environments. “I feel good that we’re doing things that Microsoft has a history of doing to run the service and protect it,” says Shahine. “OpenClaw is very powerful … so we’re also curating a set of features that we’re going to offer customers out of the box.”With Google pushing to make Gemini Spark, its own take on OpenClaw, available to connect to Workspace apps like Gmail and Docs, it feels like there’s a new AI race emerging to own the personal assistant of the enterprise. The real test will be just how well Gemini Spark and Microsoft Scout manage to organize daily work life without any major security hiccups, and just how quickly these AI agents can learn habits and preferences, just like a human assistant.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Tom Warren
