By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-06-07 07:47:00
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has publicly rebuked one of his own corporate vice presidents over a leaked strategy memo that openly stated the goal of making users “addicted” to Scout, the company’s newly announced AI assistant. In a message sent to roughly 50 of Microsoft’s top software engineers, Nadella called the framing “nonsense” and suggested whoever wrote and leaked the document “may want to go work elsewhere.”The internal note, first reported by The Information and obtained by 404 Media, was authored by Omar Shahine, the corporate vice president leading the Scout team. It outlined a three-phase plan to take the assistant “from addictive app to agentic platform”—with phase one labelled, in plain text, “make people addicted.”
The ‘addictive app’ line Microsoft is now scrambling to disown
Scout was unveiled at Build 2026 earlier this week as Microsoft’s first “Autopilot” agent—an always-on assistant built on the…
