Microsoft has added an AI agent to Teams that presents itself as a coworker, not a chatbot.
Scout is a new AI agent that lives inside Microsoft Teams and shows up the way a human colleague would: as a named presence you can interact with directly. It uses an agentic architecture capable of autonomous multi-step work and is built to absorb routine, repetitive office tasks. The pitch is simple: an assistant that never needs a break and never clocks out. Microsoft is framing it as a seamless addition to existing Teams workflows rather than a separate tool bolted on the side.
The "coworker" framing is doing a lot of work here. Positioning Scout as a colleague rather than a productivity feature is a deliberate choice, one that makes AI agents feel less like a new tab and more like a staffing decision. Microsoft's deep entrenchment in enterprise infrastructure gives it unusual leverage: Teams already handles daily communication for millions of organizations, and embedding agents there means they show up where real decisions get made. That's a different foothold than any standalone AI productivity app, and it sets a template the rest of the industry will follow or scramble to match.
The always-available angle is a feature in the product brief and an open question on the org chart. Nobody has quite answered who is accountable when the coworker that never logs off makes a bad call.