The Microsoft OpenClaw team is taking on the personal assistant challenge

Bob. Clippy. Cortana. The pilot. Microsoft has been trying to crack the personal assistant puzzle for decades. Now a fledgling team within the company that has been experimenting with OpenClaw — an open-source framework that serves as both a virtual assistant and a platform for building and managing active agents — is taking a stab at the problem.

That group, led by Business Vice President Omar Shahine, already has a working agent prototype and, as of May 1, more than 3,000 daily users within Microsoft’s testing “Project Lobster,” a desktop environment based on OpenClaw, up from 100 last week.

Not bad for a technology that CEO Satya Nadella dismissed as a “virus”-like security risk a few months ago. A number of other companies, including OpenAI and NVIDIA, are also racing to integrate the technology with their own.

Shahine’s team’s vision is to build “an ever-present agent team (a Chief of Staff agent, a Senior Assistant agent, and a list of specialist agents) working 24/7 on your behalf within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem,” as he explains in a blog post.

“A persistent runtime that continuously monitors your signals, prepares your day before you wake up, checks your inbox while you’re in meetings, and tracks action items without being prompted,” he explained.

OpenClaw, developed by Peter Steinberger (who, as of Feb. 2026, works for OpenAI) has only been publicly available since Nov. 2025, originally under the name Clawdbot.

Shahine had been talking to OpenClaw since earlier this year to automate household tasks, like writing an email or checking concert ticket prices. He demonstrated how Lobster works during a presentation at Microsoft’s AI Accelerator group on Feb. 26. And on March 31, he had a new role at Microsoft: Bringing OpenClaw and personal agents to Microsoft 365.

Microsoft recently entered the autonomous agent space with Copilot Tasks, an agent in consumer preview designed to help with household tasks such as checking email and booking tours. On the business side, Microsoft is combining Anthropic’s Cowork technology with Microsoft 365 Copilot in the form of “Claude Cowork,” which takes action within various Microsoft Office applications.

But none of these methods offer a virtual assistant that works on behalf of users 24/7 with access to people’s full, real lives, Shahine maintains. They can’t do things like order from DoorDash if the user is in a series of meetings or reschedule a call if it interrupts a family dinner. That gap is why he decided to target information workers, he said.

Shahine’s team, known as Ocean 11, consists of several people, each with their own Lobster agent. The team builds the runtime and supporting infrastructure needed to make Lobster work in an enterprise environment.

As Lobster is currently envisioned, it will work across all kinds of applications with Microsoft 365 and other data sources. It will not always need to be prompted, but instead, it will suggest courses to take, pending user approval.

And that’s why Nadella and other security-minded experts are skeptical of OpenClaw: It works automatically, can import untested input, store persistent credentials, and can turn things like quick injection attacks into injectable ones.

Current guidance from Microsoft’s Defender security team states: “OpenClaw should be treated as a trusted source of code and persistent information. It is not safe to run on a personal or regular business environment.”

In the interview, Shahine admitted that Microsoft’s offering based on OpenClaw that strengthens the business requires work No. 1. His team is designing prototype agents to have their Microsoft 365 identity, which means their Entra management ID, their Exchange mailbox, their Groups presence, and integration with Microsoft Graph.

“My goal is to contribute to making OpenClaw better but also use it and use it to become a reference design, a reference pattern that people can look at and say, ‘Well, you know, it’s great. Microsoft figured out how to make this thing a good business,'” he said.

Shahine wasn’t ready to talk about timetables or deliverables, beyond the Teams plug-in available in OpenClaw. But the team has already developed a desktop environment for Mac and Windows called ClawPilot (not related to clawpilot.ai) that it uses internally to run “claw-like workflows.” Shahine said ClawPilot works as her assistant and goes by “Sebastien” (a nod to “The Little Mermaid”).

Microsoft Vice President Scott Hanselman has created a Windows node for OpenClaw that could get airtime at Microsoft’s upcoming developer conference in San Francisco in June. Shahine said “there will be concrete information about how we’re working to make Windows a better place for OpenClaw and other applications to run.”