Cyrus is off sick, so Richard and David hold the fort, and the planned running order lasts about ninety seconds. David opens on Microsoft's redesigned Copilot app and Autopilot, the agent formerly known as Scout, which runs in the cloud with its own identity and keeps working after you log off. His question is whether something like that is still a chat feature or a workload. Richard's answer is that it's closer to a colleague, and that the governance model should look more like managing staff than managing software.

That leads to the more uncomfortable part of the conversation. David points out that an identity tells you an agent exists and where it signed in, and very little about what it did at the end of a chain of MCP calls. Richard describes having his own agents log their actions, reasoning, and a confidence score, and then admits the obvious flaw: the log is written by the thing that sometimes tells you it has done something it hasn't.

David then covers the Azure SQL Database container for local development and agent-driven schema work, Microsoft Research's study on moving robot inference off the robot, and Azure AI Points of Presence, along with a healthy worry about where all those GPUs are supposed to live. Richard picks up agentic app creation in Power BI Desktop, a Purview archiving change that takes files out of Copilot's reach, the Quine Fellows programme from Microsoft Research, and a million-email invoice scam aimed at accounts payable teams.

• The new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot
• The Verge on the Copilot super app
• Azure SQL Database container
• Offloaded inference for physical AI robotics
• ExpressRoute and AI Points of Presence
• FabCon and SQLCon 2026 announcements
• Purview retention settings and archiving
• Introducing Quine
• AI-assisted executive impersonation and invoice fraud

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