Microsoft is preparing a major Copilot upgrade, with internal teams now building features designed to make Copilot behave more like OpenClaw, the open‑source AI agent framework that has quickly become a favorite among power users and developers. The goal is to move beyond simple chat-style helpers and turn Copilot into a system of autonomous agents that can plan, execute, and maintain multi‑step workflows across Microsoft 365 and Azure with minimal user supervision.
According to a report from The Information, Microsoft has created a dedicated group to translate the enthusiasm around OpenClaw into concrete Copilot capabilities, with executives betting that agent‑style features will help it defend and grow its AI business against Anthropic and other rivals in the enterprise market. The company has already started experimenting with OpenClaw‑inspired patterns in products like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and GitHub Copilot, and is expected to show more of its roadmap at Build 2026 in June.
Microsoft 365 Copilot upgrade for AI agents
Under the hood, Microsoft is extending its existing Copilot agent stack rather than starting from scratch. Today, Microsoft 365 Copilot already supports “agents” that can be wired into business workflows, Copilot Search that pulls context from both Microsoft and third‑party apps, and a Researcher agent that quietly orchestrates multiple models behind the scenes before returning an answer. On top of that, Microsoft’s Copilot Coworker and Copilot Tasks are bringing in long‑running, multi‑step agents that can work across apps and files over time — closer to OpenClaw’s “AI that acts, not just chats” promise.
OpenClaw itself has exploded in popularity by making it easy for users to spin up autonomous agents that connect to everyday tools, from WhatsApp and email to project trackers and browsers, and then let those agents carry out tasks in the background. Microsoft is now tapping into that model directly: the company is “exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw” inside its own stack, and there is already a fully integrated OpenClaw plugin for Microsoft Teams that lets users talk to their agent in DMs, group chats, or channels. For Copilot, that means shifting from one‑off prompts to persistent, OpenClaw‑style workers that can remember context, coordinate tools, and take action over longer periods.
For enterprise customers, the stakes is high. Microsoft is pitching Copilot agents as a way to automate everything from live‑site incident triage in SRE teams to complex business workflows across Fabric, GitHub, and Microsoft 365 apps. Early internal and community experiments use agentic Copilot setups to analyze telemetry, identify code owners, draft pull requests, and route tickets, all with minimal human intervention. But the same power raises fresh security and governance questions — including how to prevent agents from over‑reaching, how to audit their actions, and how to manage access when they operate across many services at once.
Industry watchers expect Microsoft to lean heavily on its Copilot Frontier program to roll out OpenClaw‑inspired features first to early adopters, then more broadly once guardrails and admin controls mature. With Build 2026 on the horizon and demand surging for agentic systems that can actually “do the work,” Microsoft is clearly signaling that Copilot is on a path from AI assistant to AI coworker — and OpenClaw is shaping that journey as much as any internal demo.
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