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.