Autopilot will roam between Teams, Outlook and beyond
It’s fair to say that Microsoft has been behind on rolling out support for agents — though whether its development efforts have truly lagged, or whether it has simply been more careful with how data is handled, is unclear. The other Copilot efforts, from Today to Code, feel like they straddle consumers and businesses. Autopilot, meanwhile, seems aimed at businesses first.
The fundamental problem, however, is the same. “The hallmark of an amazing, long-running agent is autonomy and flexibility,” Andreou said. “It is their superpower. That is the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin or somebody who’s trying to maintain a business posture.”
An Autopilot will be an agent that you name, assign a role and tasks to, with its own memory, permissions, compute, and workspace, Microsoft says. Autopilots won’t “live” within any one application, but instead will roam between Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft applications, governed by oversight and policy. And there could be hundreds, Microsoft believes.
Microsoft hasn’t said anything about Autopilots arriving on Windows, or within the consumer or small business versions of Microsoft 365. Still, hundreds of autonomous agents crawling about your virtual workspace? With ongoing reports about how AI agents from OpenAI and others “broke containment” and hacked external companies, I’m still concerned about trading the benefits of automating certain productivity tasks with the risks of autonomous AIs pursuing their own direction. Hopefully, Microsoft has all of this locked down as it begins testing Autopilots at the end of this month.