Windows 365: Five Years In, See What's New

An AI agent works inside your Windows 365 Cloud PC from a Teams chat on your phone — finding downloaded files, editing documents, and drafting emails with your laptop lid closed. Microsoft Scout, a new Autopilot agent powered by the open source OpenClaw project, runs on your own Cloud PC using your identity, your files, and your apps. Developers get a Developer Optimized Cloud PC preloaded with GitHub, VS Code, and Node.js that runs Foundry Local for token-free AI coding, and input and output protection capabilities black out the screen when anyone tries to capture a sensitive file. Bhavya Chopra, Windows 365 Partner Director, joins Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, to show how Windows 365 now covers every seat — end users, developers, admins, and the AI agents working alongside them.  👥 Who it's for: architects and IT teams deploying AI agents like Scout and Windows 365 for Agents, developers who want a pre-configured cloud coding environment with local AI, security and compliance teams enforcing data loss prevention on remote desktops, and admins managing Cloud PC connection health. ⏱️ Chapters: 0:00 What's new across Windows 365 Cloud PCs 0:59 Why Cloud PC adoption keeps accelerating 2:04 Healthcare and telecom Windows 365 case studies 3:14 Sign in to a full Windows desktop anywhere 4:10 Block screenshots with input and output protection capabilities 4:35 Pull table data from images with Click to Do 5:19 Resume your Cloud PC session on an iPad 5:52 Publish Cloud Apps with Windows 365 Flex 7:01 Give AI agents a dedicated Cloud PC 7:27 Run Microsoft Scout from a Teams chat 9:43 Code on a Developer Optimized Cloud PC 10:11 Run local AI with Foundry Local and Phi-4 11:57 Track Cloud PC connection health in Intune 13:03 Troubleshoot connection issues with an AI agent 14:03 What's next for Windows 365 Microsoft Scout takes instructions from a Teams chat and carries them out inside your Cloud PC — locating a report in the Downloads folder that never synced to OneDrive, summarizing it, appending the summary to the file, saving it, then drafting an email with the document attached and holding it for review. It reports progress back in Teams the whole time, so nothing requires touching the physical device. For agent workloads that need isolation instead, Windows 365 for Agents provisions a dedicated Cloud PC with its own unique identity and scoped access, and the same agentic infrastructure powers Computer Use in Researcher. Developer Optimized Cloud PCs skip the environment build entirely: sign in to a machine already loaded with GitHub, VS Code, and Node.js, then run Foundry Local against the Phi-4-mini small language model to generate an app and run it — CPU spikes visible in Task Manager and Windows Machine Learning profiling in VS Code confirm inference is local, with no cloud tokens spent to code or to run the finished app. Input and output protection capabilities black out the Cloud PC screen the instant someone attempts a screenshot from the accessing device, and extends the same block to third-party screen recorders and key loggers. Alongside it, AI-enabled Cloud PCs running at least 8 vCPUs add Click to Do, which lifts text out of non-selectable images and graphical tables straight into Excel, plus Semantic Search across the desktop. Sessions roam: disconnect on a laptop, reconnect on an iPad, and apps and display settings come back as you left them. Windows 365 Cloud Apps with Windows 365 Flex publishes individual apps from a shared Cloud PC pool with user experience sync across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the browser. And in the Intune admin center, new monitoring dashboards track connection health, failures, round trip times, and license utilization in near real time, while an admin agent in preview triages issues to a root cause — like a regional cohort set to TCP-only transport instead of UDP with RDP Shortpath.  🔗 Related links:  ► Check out https://aka.ms/windows365 ► See the latest Windows 365 updates at https://aka.ms/Windows365Turns5 ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? Microsoft's Official Video Series for IT \- Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries \- Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog \- Podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Join us on social: \- https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics \- https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ \- https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ \- https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics