How OpenClaw Could Transform Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft is all-in on the agentic era. Its latest bet? An open-source AI agent framework built by a solo developer that took the tech world by storm.
This story originally appeared in the April 11 issue of The AI Economy on LinkedIn. Read the full issue here.
When it comes to the agentic era, Microsoft is all gas, no brakes. Despite its struggles to get enterprise customers to pay for Copilot, the company is continuing to reimagine how work gets done. In this pursuit to transform every business into so-called Frontier Firms, Microsoft is betting that the next big thing lies with the OpenClaw framework. Recently, it created a new team led by Omar Shahine, who previously led Microsoft Word, to build what he calls “a new generation of proactive assistants, ones that lighten your load by taking on tasks end-to-end, and that they can also step in proactively when they can help.”
Created by developer Peter Steinberger—who has since joined OpenAI—OpenClaw is one of the fastest-growing open-source AI agent projects. It functions as a virtual assistant that can run on your machine and do things on your behalf, including managing files, sending emails, browsing the web, and automating workflows across apps you already use. It’s the vision of agents taking control of the wheel at work—but its rise is being shadowed by security concerns.
These risks are one reason for the growing number of alternative frameworks. For example, after seeing that his OpenClaw agent had downloaded all his WhatsApp messages insecurely, developer Gavriel Cohen created NanoClaw. However, while there are at least four competing technologies, OpenClaw has currently gained the most traction. Its GitHub repository has more than 354,000 stars—suggesting a high degree of confidence from the developer community—and has been forked more than 70,000 times. There are now nearly 50,000 OpenClaw-related repos on GitHub, far more than any of the other “Claw families.”
Skill development is also accelerating, with more than 44,000 skills listed on ClawHub as of April 2026.
The enterprise world is paying attention. Tencent launched its own OpenClaw product suite last week, while Alibaba Cloud, Moonshot, and Xiaomi have released supported apps. Nvidia went further and built NemoClaw—an enterprise-grade security stack on top of OpenClaw—with Adobe, IBM’s Red Hat, and Box expressing interest. Salesforce, which is separately pushing deeper into autonomous agents, has acknowledged parallels between OpenClaw’s architecture and its own development roadmap.
Microsoft hasn’t officially revealed what Shahine’s team has built yet, though the earliest preview may come at Build 2026, set for June in San Francisco. What’s clear is that Microsoft already has the foundation in place. M365 Copilot supports agents that let organizations quickly build custom apps and workflows, Copilot Search provides a universal, AI-powered search layer that pulls from both Microsoft and third-party apps, and its Researcher agent now uses multiple models simultaneously to improve accuracy before a response ever reaches the user. And Microsoft brought the technology behind Anthropic’s Claude Cowork into Copilot, enabling long-running, multi-step work that executes across apps and files over time. Sound familiar?
You can start using OpenClaw in some Microsoft apps. In fact, there’s a “fully integrated” plugin for Microsoft Teams, enabling you to talk with your OpenClaw agent via direct messages, group chats, or channels.
“People are hungry for this. Not another chatbot. Not another tool that helps when you remember to ask. An always-on agent that works on your behalf, 24/7, with real access to your real life,” Shahine writes in a blog post.
His team, which he calls Ocean 11, is deliberately small, though each one is “a force multiplier.” Everyone is a builder and possesses a founder mindset. Shahine explains that their job is not to write features, but “build and refine the system that writes features.” Success for the team means developing a team of agents—not chatbots that respond when prompted—that operates 24/7/365 within Microsoft 365. They’ll continuously monitor what you’re doing, help you plan your day, assist you with all those emails, and tackle action items on your behalf.
Regardless of its risks, OpenClaw appears to be the future of the agentic enterprise. If Microsoft gets this right, OpenClaw stops being a developer curiosity and becomes the infrastructure layer for how hundreds of millions of office workers interact with AI. That’s a different kind of scale than anything OpenClaw’s community has imagined. The security concerns are real, and Microsoft will have to solve them before IT admins and business leaders fully buy in. And the company does have the infrastructure and software to mitigate risks and handle access permissioning at scale, especially for agents. But if everything goes according to plan, Microsoft 365 Copilot may be about to become something meaningfully more powerful than it is today.
Want to go deeper on OpenClaw? ClawBeat.co tracks everything — sourced news, research papers, events, and videos — all in one place.