Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal [View all]

Source: 404 Media

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” internal documentation seen by 404 Media reads.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools—the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an “always-on personal agent” that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365.

The internal Microsoft document, called “ClawPilot: Overview and Plan with Project Lobster,” seen by 404 Media has a subheading called “ClawPilot Overall Plan,” which notes “three phases” to its launch plan. The first phase is “Make people addicted.”

“Continue shipping the standalone ClawPilot experience. Pilot the UX, grow the user base, and build the skill and tool ecosystem that makes people depend on it daily. This is already happening organically,” the document says. Omar Shahine, the Microsoft executive leading the project, adds that in its pilot with Microsoft employees, they have seen “Daily Usage with High Retention and intensity of usage (chats, queries, workflows, skills).” The additional phases of the plan involve connecting ClawPilot to other AI tools and eventually adding new features.

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/microsoft-wants-to-make-people-addicted-to-scout-its-new-ai-assistant-internal-documents-reveal/

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It's been obvious for years that the goal of AI companies was to make users addicted to their products (those chatbots are sycophantic for the same reason). But it's good to have internal evidence. (Just as there's plenty of internal evidence that the AI companies knew they were stealing the intellectual property their AI models were trained on, breaking the law, whatever fake arguments they've tried to make since then to deny it was theft.)