Check overnight Teams standups and surface action items
Scout 12 June 2026 · by Susanth Sutheesh · 9 min read. Task: Scout 12 June 2026 · by Susanth Sutheesh · 9 min read ↗ Microsoft Scout's always-on engine — heartbeats every 15-120 minutes, named automations, the layered memory model (local + cloud + Work IQ), and the curated persona picker for tuning Scout's voice. 🔄 Part of the Microsoft Scout — Complete Guide series. This is the automations + memory + personality spoke. Scout’s engine settings can change between releases. Last verified: 29 September 2026 · Scout version 0.23.0.20260608.1. Naming update: Microsoft is renaming Scout to Autopilot (announced 25 Sep 2026, expanding to private preview); the desktop app is still branded “Microsoft Scout” as it rolls out, so read “Scout” here as Autopilot (formerly Scout). The hub for this series — Microsoft Scout — The Complete Guide — covers what Scout is, how it differs from Copilot, what it costs, and the honest take. This spoke is the always-on-engine reference. The Autopilot delta — what separates Scout from chat — lives mostly in this spoke. Heartbeats and automations are how Scout keeps working when you’re not at the keyboard. Memory is how it remembers what you handed it last week. Personality is how it adapts to the way you actually want to be talked to. Heartbeats — Scout’s pulse When heartbeats are enabled, Scout wakes itself up on a configurable interval — anywhere from every 15 minutes to every 120 minutes. On each wake, it runs a prompt you’ve defined. The prompt can do almost anything: scan your inbox for urgent items, check a dashboard, run a status pull on a topic Scout has been watching for you, refresh a specific report, summarise overnight activity. Three things to know about heartbeats in practice: They’re not a separate scheduling engine — they’re prompts on a schedule. Whatever you can write in a normal Scout prompt, you can ask the heartbeat to run. They surface results on your next interaction. If a heartbeat finds nothing worth flagging, it completes silently. If it finds something, you’ll see a notification or a Teams message when you next come back. They run under your identity. Same Work IQ delegated-auth constraint as everything else — heartbeats can’t run if you’ve signed out of Scout. The heartbeat interval is the dial that matters most. 15 minutes for urgent work (e.g. on-call rota where Scout is watching for incident pages). 60-90 minutes for typical work (the rhythm most users settle into). 120 minutes for slower, less-urgent monitoring (e.g. a weekly status check). Heartbeats can be turned off entirely via the DisableHeartbeat ADMX policy if your tenant has compliance requirements that don’t allow always-on AI. Detail in the secure-config spoke (row 21 of the secure-config table). The Heartbeat configuration panel in my own install. Frequency (here every 30 min) is the cadence dial. Schedule picks the time window — “Work hours” preset opens a sub-card where you mark your weekdays and the start/end hours. What to check is the prompt Scout runs every time the heartbeat fires (mine: “check all my standups” — pulls overnight activity across my Teams stand-up channels and surfaces anything I need to action). Notice the inline PERMISSIONS counter at the bottom — 52 tool rules here, but 51 in the earlier secure-config screenshot taken a few hours before this one. That single delta is exactly the audit-drift signal the secure-config Permissions metric callout is built around: numbers move, dig in. Sidebar — the panel also surfaces “Sleep prevention”. Heartbeats only fire while your device is awake. Scout flags this directly: if you want heartbeats to run while you’re away from the keyboard, you need to disable sleep at the OS level (the link in the panel jumps to Settings → Power Management). Worth confirming for any “always-on” use case. Automations — named, repeatable workflows Beyond the periodic heartbeat, Scout supports named automations — workflows you define once and run on a schedule or in response to an event. The shape of an automation: A name (e.g. “morning brief”, “weekly customer status”, “VIP email watch”) A trigger (a cron-like schedule, or an event such as “new email from sender X”) A stored prompt (what Scout should do when the trigger fires) A run history (each fire is logged with timestamp + outcome + what was surfaced) The Activity surface (ellipsis menu → Activity) is where you see what’s coming up, the history of what’s run, and the Teams-bot view:; tools: Microsoft Scout. Human role: The original post does not say how a person stayed involved.; limitations: Prerequisites include Scout/Autopilot installation and active Teams access. Constraints: Heartbeats require the device to remain awake (OS sleep disabled) and cannot run if the user is signed out. Compliance: DisableHeartbeat ADMX policy may block this in regulated tenants. Source reliability: Secondary blog post; features may change between releases..
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Overview
Scout 12 June 2026 · by Susanth Sutheesh · 9 min read
Workflow
Scout 12 June 2026 · by Susanth Sutheesh · 9 min read ↗ Microsoft Scout's always-on engine — heartbeats every 15-120 minutes, named automations, the layered memory model (local + cloud + Work IQ), and the curated persona picker for tuning Scout's voice. 🔄 Part of the Microsoft Scout — Complete Guide series. This is the automations + memory + personality spoke. Scout’s engine settings can change between releases. Last verified: 29 September 2026 · Scout version 0.23.0.20260608.1. Naming update: Microsoft is renaming Scout to Autopilot (announced 25 Sep 2026, expanding to private preview); the desktop app is still branded “Microsoft Scout” as it rolls out, so read “Scout” here as Autopilot (formerly Scout). The hub for this series — Microsoft Scout — The Complete Guide — covers what Scout is, how it differs from Copilot, what it costs, and the honest take. This spoke is the always-on-engine reference. The Autopilot delta — what separates Scout from chat — lives mostly in this spoke. Heartbeats and automations are how Scout keeps working when you’re not at the keyboard. Memory is how it remembers what you handed it last week. Personality is how it adapts to the way you actually want to be talked to. Heartbeats — Scout’s pulse When heartbeats are enabled, Scout wakes itself up on a configurable interval — anywhere from every 15 minutes to every 120 minutes. On each wake, it runs a prompt you’ve defined. The prompt can do almost anything: scan your inbox for urgent items, check a dashboard, run a status pull on a topic Scout has been watching for you, refresh a specific report, summarise overnight activity. Three things to know about heartbeats in practice: They’re not a separate scheduling engine — they’re prompts on a schedule. Whatever you can write in a normal Scout prompt, you can ask the heartbeat to run. They surface results on your next interaction. If a heartbeat finds nothing worth flagging, it completes silently. If it finds something, you’ll see a notification or a Teams message when you next come back. They run under your identity. Same Work IQ delegated-auth constraint as everything else — heartbeats can’t run if you’ve signed out of Scout. The heartbeat interval is the dial that matters most. 15 minutes for urgent work (e.g. on-call rota where Scout is watching for incident pages). 60-90 minutes for typical work (the rhythm most users settle into). 120 minutes for slower, less-urgent monitoring (e.g. a weekly status check). Heartbeats can be turned off entirely via the DisableHeartbeat ADMX policy if your tenant has compliance requirements that don’t allow always-on AI. Detail in the secure-config spoke (row 21 of the secure-config table). The Heartbeat configuration panel in my own install. Frequency (here every 30 min) is the cadence dial. Schedule picks the time window — “Work hours” preset opens a sub-card where you mark your weekdays and the start/end hours. What to check is the prompt Scout runs every time the heartbeat fires (mine: “check all my standups” — pulls overnight activity across my Teams stand-up channels and surfaces anything I need to action). Notice the inline PERMISSIONS counter at the bottom — 52 tool rules here, but 51 in the earlier secure-config screenshot taken a few hours before this one. That single delta is exactly the audit-drift signal the secure-config Permissions metric callout is built around: numbers move, dig in. Sidebar — the panel also surfaces “Sleep prevention”. Heartbeats only fire while your device is awake. Scout flags this directly: if you want heartbeats to run while you’re away from the keyboard, you need to disable sleep at the OS level (the link in the panel jumps to Settings → Power Management). Worth confirming for any “always-on” use case. Automations — named, repeatable workflows Beyond the periodic heartbeat, Scout supports named automations — workflows you define once and run on a schedule or in response to an event. The shape of an automation: A name (e.g. “morning brief”, “weekly customer status”, “VIP email watch”) A trigger (a cron-like schedule, or an event such as “new email from sender X”) A stored prompt (what Scout should do when the trigger fires) A run history (each fire is logged with timestamp + outcome + what was surfaced) The Activity surface (ellipsis menu → Activity) is where you see what’s coming up, the history of what’s run, and the Teams-bot view:
Reported result
The source does not report measured outcomes or success rates for this specific workflow. It notes that heartbeats complete silently if nothing is flagged, and results appear as notifications or Teams messages. Proposed acceptance check: Verify that a test heartbeat correctly identifies a known action item in a dummy Teams channel and surfaces it to the user.
Human role
The original post does not say how a person stayed involved.
Limitations
Prerequisites include Scout/Autopilot installation and active Teams access. Constraints: Heartbeats require the device to remain awake (OS sleep disabled) and cannot run if the user is signed out. Compliance: DisableHeartbeat ADMX policy may block this in regulated tenants. Source reliability: Secondary blog post; features may change between releases.
Try it
I want to set up a Microsoft Scout heartbeat to monitor my Teams stand-up channels for overnight action items. My business context is [replaceable: e.g., software development team]. The target users are [replaceable: e.g., project managers]. Please guide me through configuring the heartbeat in Scout with a frequency of [replaceable: e.g., 60 minutes] during [replaceable: e.g., work hours]. Use the prompt 'check all my standups' to scan [replaceable: specific Teams channel names]. Before enabling this for real, perform a dry run on a test channel with known dummy messages to verify it surfaces action items correctly. Show me the output format. Confirm with me before enabling the heartbeat on my primary device. Ensure I understand that my device must stay awake for this to work. If the heartbeat finds nothing, confirm it completes silently. Do not send any messages or make changes without my explicit approval after reviewing the dry run results.
Source reports are not independently verified. Publication date is the catalog publication date, not the original article date.