Microsoft debuts “Scout” at Build, a new personal agent for work

At Microsoft Build on Tuesday in San Francisco, the company debuted Microsoft Scout, a new personal agent for work that uses your existing tools to understand how you work and proactively handle routine tasks. 

What Scout does

Microsoft Scout — available now for all Frontier customers, with more details and a broader rollout to come later — is built on OpenClaw and WorkIQ, the intelligence layer for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

According to Microsoft, the personal agent will work alongside users’ existing toolsets — think Teams, Outlook, and more.

Scout “understands how you work” and can proactively handle jobs, like resolving scheduling conflicts, preparing for meetings, and other routine tasks, without having to be asked. 

The technology company says Scout “understands how you work” and can proactively handle jobs, like resolving scheduling conflicts, preparing for meetings, and other routine tasks, without having to be asked. 

Why now?

In its release, Microsoft says it believes “your agents should reflect how you think and operate,” taking into account the broader scope of your work environment, including workflows, business logic, and institutional knowledge — and notes that this context should extend to always-on, autonomous agents. 

Microsoft Scout is only available to Frontier customers. Microsoft says it will share more information soon as part of a broader roll-out. 

Scout’s debut comes alongside a slew of other announcements from the company as it kicks off its two-day Build conference, including: Microsoft IQ, a new context layer that grounds agents in enterprise and world knowledge, available today across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot Studio; WebIQ, an AI-first web search stack and what Microsoft calls “the fastest real-world grounding you can give your agents”; plus, a family of seven new in-house models from the Microsoft AI Superintelligence Team, including the company’s first reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1. 

At Build, Microsoft stressed the changing tides of the new agentic era, noting developers now need “ubiquitous intelligence” and a full stack that supports them from the cloud to the edge. If Scout can understand how teams work and provide proactive support for at least some day-to-day tasks, then it could play a supporting role in helping teams build agentic systems faster. 

The announcement of Scout comes after recent leaks of Google’s Remy, an OpenClaw-style agent the tech giant is rumored to be developing that can perform actions on a user’s behalf. Remy is suspected of serving as a Gemini-powered personal agent. It’s too early to tell whether and how Microsoft Scout compares to the rumored Remy, but the limited information available suggests both companies are moving toward personal agents that go beyond answering questions or summarizing content.