(Image credit: Microsoft)
The AI space is competitive. While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have dominated, Microsoft is coming out swinging right now. With the yearly Microsoft Build event now wrapped up, we can officially say Microsoft is going all in on the next phase of AI: agents.Agentic AI is a term you’ve likely heard thrown around a lot, and while it is often talked up with marketing buzzwords, the idea is fairly simple. Whilst AI of the past often worked in a Q&A format, answering your prompts with detailed explanations, agentic AI looks to skip the middleman and do your tasks for you.It could find all of the best restaurants in your city, but then go the extra step and book a table for you. Or it could read through all of your financial documents and do your taxes for you, or even analyze data and create spreadsheets before sending them off to your colleagues.In other words, agentic AI is less assistant and more fully fledged employee. While there have been concerns in the past with this kind of technology occasionally going rogue, major improvements are being made every week.So with Build now wrapped up, here is everything you need to know about how Windows is adopting agentic AI like never before.Scout and Autoagents(Image credit: Microsoft)One of the more interesting announcements from Microsoft was what it called ‘autoagents’. These are AI agents that are always on, working autonomously in the background on your behalf.The first of these to be revealed is Scout, the company’s first Autopilot agent. It will be available across the suite of Microsoft 365 apps, working in the background across your most-used Microsoft apps.Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.This includes Teams, Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint, accessing your chats, email, calendar and more.In some example demos of the tool, Microsoft showed Scout keeping an eye on a user’s inbox and Teams, looking for any outstanding decisions that need to be made. Microsoft has stated that the tool is powered by OpenClaw open-source technology.While the details of Scout are still very sparse, the idea is clear. Scout will be able to do tasks like monitoring your emails to notify you of urgent responses, scan through documents sent by your colleagues to provide overviews and even block out time in your calendar for a task you keep putting off.Over time, these autonomous agents will learn and develop. This could mean completing tasks before you even ask, knowing how you would respond to emails or becoming aware of your working patterns, adapting to your workflow.
