Omar Shahine, Corporate Vice President @ Microsoft - OpenClaw + M365 (former CVP of MS Word), posting about how a personal AI assistant project got him a new job at Microsoft and he's now building a desktop runtime they internally call ClawPilot. He says:
"Finally, we forked OpenClaw with the intention of contributing to the project! We have a lot of ideas we are exploring now."
Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
Try and search for 'recycle bin' and you get zero local results in Windows 11. Unless you've gone and manually added the desktop icon into you Start menu items.
30 years ago, Win95 introduced the Recycle Bin. Maybe, just maybe, you should have made it discoverable via the Start menu by now?
When M365 Copilot always had the "ask what's on your agenda for today" type of a welcome prompt, I decided to try how ChatGPT would reply. Whereas Microsoft has my email, calendar and files, its answer is just boring facts about tasks and activities.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, had none of those connections. Yet its answer was significantly better. Because based on our daily chats, it knew what was important to me and what I should be focusing on to pursue my goals.
This made me realize what kind of a threat OpenAI is to the likes of Google and MS. They don't need to gain access to your data. You are profiling yourself to ChatGPT in a way that your calendar and email never was. By having "private" discussions with the computer.
Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on.
Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...
The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically.
If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward.
And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.
The crazy thing is how the premium M365 Copilot has only gotten worse as the free Copilot Chat has been rolled out. When the AI assistant from Microsoft can't create a calendar entry in Outlook, what are they even doing with this tech at MS?
You either get A) hallucinations of "I created the calendar entry now" (it didn't) or B) an .ics file you need to download, then import to Outlook manually.
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.
The author had worked at Microsoft for 12 years before starting the company that Google acquired. So, not only does he have a fair amount of experience from both sides, he's also worked at MS during its "lost decade" i.e. the Ballmer years.
The similarities between what MS was going through then and what Google is now facing is to me the most interesting aspect of the story. Whether you're printing money via OS or search monopoly, it seems like both the direction and timing of what's going to eventually happen to your business are almost inevitable.
MS today is quite different from what it was 10 years ago when the writer left. By getting acquired by Google in 2020, it's almost as he travelled back in time, into another Big Tech company at that same stage of the enterprise lifecycle.
"Finally, we forked OpenClaw with the intention of contributing to the project! We have a lot of ideas we are exploring now."