Microsoft has spent the past two years positioning Copilot as the AI layer across its enterprise stack. At Build 2026 in San Francisco on June 2, however, it went further. A new set of products shifts the model from AI you prompt to AI that acts without being asked.
The headline product is Scout. It is an always-on agent that runs continuously across Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, and calendar. Crucially, it joins Teams group chats and handles Outlook email threads autonomously. That makes Scout the first agent Microsoft has placed directly inside those surfaces as a participant, rather than a sidebar feature. CEO Satya Nadella introduced it as the first of a new product category, Autopilots:
"Autopilots are always-on agents that work autonomously, with their own identity, and act on your behalf."
Scout is built on OpenClaw, the open-source autonomous agent framework created by Peter Steinberger that accumulated 180,000 GitHub stars in the three months following its November 2025 launch. Microsoft chose to build Scout on top of the existing OpenClaw codebase rather than develop a competing framework, and is contributing enterprise-grade policy controls back to the project upstream. Omar Shahine, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Scout, explained how it sits within the M365 environment:
"Microsoft Scout is integrated across the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day, keeping it grounded in your flow of work. It operates across cloud, desktop, and web, connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and to the data that powers your day, including chats, email, calendar, and contacts."
Scout carries its own Entra ID, tying every action to a verifiable identity that flows through existing tenant policy. Microsoft has made it available now for Copilot Frontier users. Broader preview follows in late June, with general availability targeted for October 2026. Microsoft has indicated Scout will be an add-on for M365 E3 and E5 subscribers, though it has not yet confirmed pricing.
Work IQ: What Gives Scout Its Organisational Awareness
Scout's understanding of how a business operates comes from Work IQ, the M365 intelligence layer that reads signals from emails, files, meetings, and calendar data. Rather than waiting for users to brief it, Scout uses Work IQ to map priorities automatically. Specifically, it tracks who a user works with, which projects are active, and where decisions are stalling.
Charles Lamanna, Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, explained the premise in the Work IQ API announcement:
"Work IQ is the intelligence layer that understands your data, your tools, and your organization. That foundation allows agents to plan, act, and produce outcomes that are grounded in how your business runs."
Work IQ is now generally available across GitHub Copilot, Foundry, and Copilot Studio. Additionally, Microsoft opens its APIs to developers on June 16. From that date, any agent on the M365 stack can draw on the same organisational knowledge layer Scout uses natively.
