Microsoft has announced the wider testing of its new Autopilot feature at the Microsoft Build event this week, backed by a post on the company’s’ website.
Autopilots are described as a new category of agents that can work autonomously on a user’s behalf. Microsoft says each Autopilot has its own identity, and so multiple agents can co-exist within different rule sets, letting users run Autopilots at home, or at work, with separate governance and stipulations limiting or allowing specific activities, according to context.
Microsoft’s first Autopilot is Scout, which some internal users at Microsoft have been able to test in beta. The project is now being rolled out to “a select group of customers…and Frontier organizations,” according to the company’s blog.
Scout’s initial home will be in acting agentically in Microsoft 365 applications, working across Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, and be able to coordinate data from each platform to schedule meetings, flag important messages, and generate calendar events to keep workers on track with their tasks. Over time, Microsoft Scout learns about each user’s preferences and work patterns, aligning its activities and priorities to become more efficient and tailored.
Under the hood, Scout is built using OpenClaw, the vibe-coded project created over the course of a weekend by Peter Steinberger. Microsoft says Scout comes with enterprise-grade security and controls “so it can be trusted in your organization from day one.”
Microsoft has stated that it intends to contribute upstream to the open-source OpenClaw project.
Administrators whose organisations adopt Microsoft Scout will be able to validate that any Scout implementations operate securely within the bounds of IT and security policies, and be able to validate agent identities via dedicated Entra entries. The agentic platform will be “managed with the same rigor you expect from any first-party Microsoft service,” the company statement reads.
The algorithm takes its data protection policy from Microsoft Purview, and the credentials behind a machine identity are redacted from logs and diagnostics to preserve anonymity. Humans are required to sign off on actions deemed sensitive by the algorithm.
The early internal trials at Microsoft have allowed it to expose risks to testers using Scout on the desktop, and the company has tuned the agent to balance any security issues found with an ability to “keep work moving without constant prompting.”
Letting Autopilots take the burden of low-level tasks can “keep work in motion so it continues even when your attention is elsewhere.”
One feature will be to identify deadlines, block book a user’s calendar so preventing other activities from taking place in the run-up to a deadline, and provide the materials necessary to get around what it’s identified as a bottleneck to progressing an important, focused project.
The announcement on the Microsoft website was penned by Omar Shahine, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Scout, a Redmond lifer whose previous experience includes positions in the Windows Live, OneDrive (previously SkyDrive), and Mac Office divisions at the company.
Early adopters keen to try Scout will need to be enrolled in Microsoft’s Frontier programme, have an Intune policy configuration, offer an “opt-in attestation”, and have an active GitHub Copilot licence.
(Image source: Pixabay, under licence.)
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