A new release of Microsoft’s Scout “autopilot” – which takes action independently – is increasing users’ AI model flexibility, ability to navigate their chats, and file-type support.
The upgrade also features new Model Context Protocol (MCP) functionality for agent access to diverse data sources, as well as reliability improvements. Scout is available through the Microsoft Frontier program.
Microsoft MVP and AI commentator Josh Cook dubbed the new version (0.23.331) a “serious update” delivering “a massive amount of capability.”
Core Functions
When Microsoft introduced Scout in June, the company said it uses Microsoft’s WorkIQ for business context while operating in Teams and Outlook for conversations, as well as OneDrive and SharePoint for managing files. Scout also supports MCP servers for standards-based access to enterprise systems and data. Scout has its own Entra identity so its work is always attributable to a known entity. Scout supports user approval before external-facing actions such as sending email, posting Teams messages, updating calendar events, or running privileged operations.
Users can configure habits and skills, so the system helps them prepare for meetings, automate workflows, and perform browser-based tasks.
When starting work with Scout, a user describes the required task in natural language in the chat interface and Scout selects tools and works through the required steps, illustrating progress in real time.
Latest Features
Here are details on new features in the latest release.
Microsoft is sharing three primary enhancements related to AI model choice:
- a user-selectable context window defining how much the model can process at one time
- a default model selector based on reasoning effort required by a model per task
- live model switching on a per-message level.
Scout users are also gaining greater flexibility to manage and navigate their chats. These features include filtering based on all activity, chats, and automations. They can pin and reorder their chats. And the tool’s left navigational rail has been reorganized for greater efficiency.
Within the chat and compose function, Scout now features a redesigned compose box with a visual element or “pill” displaying the currently active AI model. There are fluent tool/permission icons; support for copying rich content into the clipboard; easier scrolling through long conversations; and manual session compaction for memory management requirements.
There’s a new editor framework supporting markdown, source, structured, or HTML options. Supported file types include CSV, TSV for tabular data, and Mermaid – which is plain text to define files and charts. There are new automations including per-automation reasoning and context configurations.
In terms of Microsoft 365, Scout now features enabled to-do tasks, lists, and subtasks, as well as Teams channel tools. MCP features include end-to-end MCP elicitation, which can be used to pause execution dynamically and ask users for missing information.
Enhanced security features include proactive auth-expiry recovery to refresh an expired user session and per-device OneDrive session folders. File access is no longer bound to a given workspace.
With this latest release, Microsoft continues to advance Scout on an aggressive trajectory to ensure it’s gaining the usability, integration, and security features that enterprises will expect as they evaluate its readiness for autonomous, enterprise-grade work.
More on Microsoft Scout:
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Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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