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.
Agent 365 and the Governance Question
Scout’s persistent, cross-app access drew an immediate reaction from enterprise IT teams. Concerns centred on data boundaries and compliance, particularly in organisations where M365 governance is tightly managed. In response, Microsoft acknowledged that full tenant-level controls are still in development, with availability expected later in 2026.
The structural answer is Agent 365, also announced at Build. It treats agents as governed identities rather than applications. Each agent gets its own productivity licence and Entra ID. As a result, admins can review, monitor, and block agents through the M365 admin centre, using the same controls they apply to human users.
Microsoft also announced two supporting open-source frameworks. First, the Agent Control Specification sets a standard for where and how controls apply in the agent execution loop. Second, ASSERT gives teams a framework for policy-driven safety evaluation and regression testing. Both are currently in preview.
One-Click Agent Publishing to Microsoft Teams
For organisations building custom agents through Copilot Studio or Microsoft Foundry, one-click publishing to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot reaches general availability next month. On publication, identity and tenant policy flow through automatically. That removes a significant integration step for enterprise developers who currently wire those connections manually.
The move also matters for channel partners and ISVs building on the M365 platform. Publishing an agent directly into Teams, with governance handled at the platform level, cuts the time between building and deploying. Ultimately, it gets agents into the environment where most enterprise users work every day.
A Copilot Super App This Summer
Nadella used the keynote to confirm a Copilot super app is coming. The app will consolidate chat, Cowork, and coding into a single interface. Although it did not appear as a live demo at Build, Nadella was direct:
“Come summer, we will be bringing coding to all knowledge work within one Copilot Super App. You’re going to have Chat, Cowork, and Code all in Copilot.”
Jacob Andreou, Microsoft’s EVP of Copilot, leads the project under the internal slogan “Delivering one Copilot.” The goal is to replace the current fragmented experience. Currently, different Copilot products carry different account requirements, interfaces, and data access models. The super app combines all of that into a single surface spanning consumer and enterprise use.
