@tjrobertson52

Just when we thought Microsoft was out of the AI game, they go ahead and announce Scout, which looks truly incredible. So I just want to talk about what this is and why every business should be paying attention right now.

Scout is a new always-on agent that works inside Microsoft 365. So instead of going to a separate app like ChatGPT, it just responds in real time the way a teammate would. It has its own email account.

It can respond to messages and teams. It can work across your calendar, Docs, spreadsheets, any Microsoft product, and connect with external tools. Essentially, it can do anything your teammate could do on a computer.

Now, if you've been following AI, you know this technology isn't new. This has been happening ever since the release of Openclaw. And in fact, Scout is built on top of Openclaw.

And that's part of what makes it potentially so powerful.

The other part is that it's very inexpensive. Microsoft has made a strategic move to not keep up with the frontier models. Instead, they're intentionally staying about six months behind those frontier models so they can keep their prices much lower.

And I think that's super smart on Microsoft's part. Right now, a lot of companies are realizing they can't continue to spend on AI like they are right now. Uber just announced that they blew through their annual AI budget in the first four months.

And a lot of people are realizing, with the right harness, you don't need the smartest model for most work these days. Also, Microsoft is making it easy for businesses to fine-tune on their own data and processes, which should further improve performance without increasing the cost.

Now if you've been keeping up with this stuff, you know that Google also recently announced Gemini Spark, which is essentially the exact same idea, except, of course, it's inside of Google Workspace and it's not built on Openclaw. They built a harness themselves. And then, of course, OpenAI recently hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of Openclaw.

They're trying to build something similar inside of Codex. And then Anthropic, which sued Openclaw for their original name, is now preventing its users from using the Max plan within Openclaw, forcing them to pay API rates. Which, of course, is because they're trying to build the exact same thing.

All the major players understand that this is coming. But question is no longer: should you be using an always-on agent for work, but rather which always-on agent is right for your business?

Now, for any large enterprises already using 365 or Google Workspace, I think the decision is gonna be pretty obvious. You'll just use the AI agent built into that workspace. It just won't make sense to use anything other than Scout or Spark, respectively.

However, for smaller organizations, say those with fewer than 50 people, I think these agents are likely to have guardrails and limitations that are hard to swallow. Now, if you're a solo entrepreneur, I think the decision is easy. You should just create your own custom agent using Openclaw or Hermie.

But there are some real challenges to using a custom agent like that inside of a team. So smaller teams are going to have to choose between the challenges of setting up their own custom solution, or the limitations of choosing one of the out-of-the-box solutions.