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Just like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates with Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help them organize calendars, expense reports, email drafts, and more.

Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant based on OpenClaw

Scout is Microsoft's "first true personal assistant."

Unlike Copilot which resides in Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do much more. “It's a personal assistant, it's the first real personal assistant that we offer to our customers,” explains Omar Shahine, vice president of Microsoft Scout, in an interview with The Verge. “I think it's important for customers to understand that you're going to get a phone call from this assistant, it's a very different type of AI than chat.”

Microsoft Scout can monitor local traffic and your calendar to recommend the best time to leave for appointments, school transfers, and dinner dates. It also works a bit like a real assistant, surfacing the things it learns as important to you by reading Teams threads, transcripts, and emails in the background.

Microsoft is off to a slow start with Scout and is only releasing a preview desktop version for its Frontier customers in the US this week, but the goal is for it to work in the cloud and always on. A more limited preview will be available to a small number of customers in the coming months, before Microsoft rolls out the full cloud version more widely.

The desktop app has already proven popular internally, with more than 3,000 Microsoft employees already using it. Engineers use Scout to schedule meetings, help with paperwork, book travel, and fill out forms. A big part of using Microsoft Scout is simply staying on top of tasks, whether work or personal. "A lot of people just use it to be better versions of themselves. ... We all have aspirations that we want for ourselves, but we often waste time and don't achieve them," says Shahine.

Instead of creating a separate version of OpenClaw, Microsoft is directly contributing core technology to the open source project. It's surprising to see Microsoft adopt OpenClaw just months after CEO Satya Nadella likened the technology to a virus. OpenClaw’s AI “skills” extensions have also been called a security nightmare. I asked Shahine why Microsoft was now confident it could handle the security and privacy aspects of an AI agent that could access a lot of critical company data.

“We have an intake process [from OpenClaw] that ensures we protect against things like supply chain risks, as well as radical changes,” says Shahine. "It's a very fast-moving open source project, one of the fastest I've ever seen. We operate OpenClaw in a sandboxed cloud environment, and we treat OpenClaw as untrusted so that it has no secrets or access to any of your Microsoft 365 data."

Microsoft also uses its suite of security features to control OpenClaw, including Agent 365, Purview, and Defender. Then there's the usual red teaming, privacy reviews, and security reviews to keep enterprise environments secure. “I'm happy that we're doing things that Microsoft is used to doing to manage the service and protect it,” says Shahine. “OpenClaw is very powerful…so we are also preparing a set of features that we are going to offer to customers directly. »

As Google works to create Gemini Spark, its own version of OpenClaw, available to connect to Workspace apps like Gmail and Docs, it feels like a new AI race is emerging to own the company's personal assistant. The real test will be how well Gemini Spark and Microsoft Scout manage to organize daily work life without any major security issues, and how quickly these AI agents can learn their habits and preferences, just like a human assistant.