By Mary Jo Foley
Publication Date: 2026-05-04 18:52:00
Bob. Clippy. Cortana. Copilot. Microsoft has been trying to unlock the personal-assistant puzzle for decades. Now a fledgling team inside the company that’s been experimenting with OpenClaw — an open-source framework that acts both a virtual assistant and platform for building and managing proactive agents — is taking a stab at the problem.
That team, headed by Corporate Vice President Omar Shahine, already has a working agent prototype and, as of May 1, more than 3,000 daily users inside Microsoft testing “Project Lobster,” the team’s OpenClaw-based desktop environment, up from 100 the previous week.
Not bad for a technology that CEO Satya Nadella dismissed as a security risk akin to “a virus” just a few months ago. A number of other companies, including OpenAI and NVIDIA, are also rushing to integrate the technology with their…