Autopilot will move between Teams, Outlook and more
It’s fair to say that Microsoft has been late in rolling out agent support, although it’s unclear whether its development efforts have actually been delayed or whether it’s simply been more careful with how data is handled. Copilot’s other efforts, from Today to Code, appear to span consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, Autopilot appears to be aimed at businesses first.
The fundamental problem, however, is the same. “The hallmark of an amazing, long-serving agent is autonomy and flexibility,” Andreou said. “It’s their superpower. That’s the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT administrator or someone trying to maintain a business posture.”
An autopilot will be an agent that you name, assign a role and tasks, with its own memory, permissions, computing and workspace, Microsoft says. Autopilots will not “live” within any application, but will move between Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft applications, governed by oversight and policies. And there could be hundreds, Microsoft believes.
Microsoft hasn’t said anything about Autopilots coming to Windows, nor within the consumer or small business versions of Microsoft 365. Still, hundreds of autonomous agents roaming around your virtual workspace? With ongoing reports about how AI agents from OpenAI and others “broke containment” and hacked outside companies, I’m still concerned about trading off the benefits of automating certain productivity tasks with the risks of autonomous AIs going their own direction. Hopefully Microsoft has all of this locked down when it starts testing Autopilots later this month.
