Build 2026: Microsoft Unveils New ‘Scout’ Personal Work Agent Powered by OpenClaw

Microsoft has kicked off its annual Build developer conference today, and as expected, agentic AI is a big focus this year. The Redmond giant already launched a couple of AI agents, including Microsoft Researcher, Copilot Cowork, and a new legal agent in Word, and the company is following up today with Scout, which it described as “a new personal agent for work.”

Scout is a new type of always-on AI agent that Microsoft refers to as “Autopilots.” In many ways, Scout is very similar to Google’s new Gemini Spark agent, which is now available for Gemini Ultra subscribers in the US. However, Microsoft Scout is powered by OpenClaw, the popular open-source platform for developing local AI agents.

“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. You interact with it in Teams, and extend its reach through the desktop app to your browser, local resources, and model context protocol servers,” explained Omar Shahine, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Scout.

Microsoft Scout is launching today via the company’s Frontier program, which allows organizations to access the company’s latest AI innovations. Unlike the cloud-based Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, Scout is a local desktop AI application that can use on-device and Microsoft 365 data, and it can access the file system and perform tasks that require local access.

“Microsoft employees have already been using an early Microsoft Scout desktop experience. We built this to learn how always-on agents show up in real work, and we are seeing it take on coordination, surface risks earlier, and keep work moving without constant prompting,” Shahine said today.