New Copilot Autopilot, Azure SQL Container, AI PoPs, Power BI Apps, and Purview Archiving

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. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:49 The new Copilot app and Autopilot 03:59 Workload or workforce 07:21 Identity is not governance 09:07 Can you trust an agent's own log 12:32 Copilot as the OS for work 15:27 Azure SQL Database container 20:40 Offloading robot inference 27:05 Azure AI Points of Presence 32:02 The data centre capacity problem 33:13 Agentic apps in Power BI Desktop 36:19 Purview archiving and Copilot indexing 39:58 Quine Fellows programme 40:52 AI-assisted invoice fraud 46:10 Wrap up Links: Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot (Microsoft): https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026... Microsoft thinks its new Copilot super app will be as influential as Office (The Verge): https://www.theverge.com/news/1000532... Build locally, ship to Azure, meet Azure SQL Database container (Microsoft): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-... Azure SQL Database container agent skills (Microsoft): https://microsoft.github.io/azure-sql... Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics (Microsoft Research): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea... Scaling distributed AI infrastructure with ExpressRoute and AI Points of Presence (Microsoft): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/b... FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona (Microsoft): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blo... Retention settings, archiving retained SharePoint files (Microsoft Learn): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/pur... Introducing Quine (Microsoft Research): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea... Protecting organizations from AI-assisted executive impersonation and invoice fraud (Microsoft Security): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/secur... Socials: X/Twitter: https://x.com/richardihogan Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/richardihoga... LinkedIn:   / richardhogan   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?... Threads: https://www.threads.com/@richardhogan323 Music: Null Invocation, Monochrome Pulse https://is.gd/b1kNU9