Skip to main content

​
Microsoft Outlook

The Microsoft Outlook integration lets an agent work in each person’s own Outlook during a conversation — search and read their mail and calendar, look people up, fetch attachments, find a meeting time, and (when you enable it) send mail, reply, draft, and create or cancel events. The agent always acts as the asking user and sees only what that person can already see. Setup takes about a minute and needs nothing in the Microsoft 365 admin center — Cobalt hosts the Microsoft sign-in.
This is the Outlook integration — a tool an agent uses inside a chat, voice, Slack, or Teams conversation. It is not an email channel; the agent does not hold conversations over email here. It also acts only on the asking user’s own mailbox and calendar — not shared mailboxes, delegate calendars, or other people’s mail.

​
Modules

Reads in each enabled module are on by default. Write tools are off until you turn them on, one at a time.

​
What it can and can’t do

It can
  • Answer questions across mail, calendar, and tasks in one go (“what did Maria send about the budget, and is a deck attached?”).
  • Find a time that works for several people and put the meeting on your calendar.
  • Send, reply, draft, create or cancel — when those tools are enabled — always as you, and with a confirmation step before anything risky (sending mail, cancelling a meeting).
  • Link straight to the message, event, or task it’s talking about.
It can’t
  • Read or act on shared mailboxes, delegate calendars, or anyone else’s mailbox — only the signed-in user’s own data.
  • Act as the organization. There are no admin / org-wide tools here and no tenant-admin consent is required. Everything runs with each user’s own permission.
  • Hold a conversation over email (that’s a separate email channel feature).

​
Set it up

1

Add the integration

From your agent, open Integrations, choose Microsoft Outlook, and pick the modules you want — Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks. A scheduling assistant usually wants Calendar + People; a mail triage agent wants Mail.
2

Turn on any write tools you want (optional)

Reads are on by default. To let the agent send mail, draft, reply, or create / cancel events, switch those tools on individually. Leaving them off keeps the integration read-only.
3

Attest to the access requested

Review the Microsoft permissions. The higher-impact ones — sending mail, changing the calendar, reading tasks, checking others’ free/busy — are flagged and only appear when you’ve enabled the matching tools. Confirm, name the integration, and save.
4

Let people authorize themselves

The first time the agent uses an Outlook tool for someone, that person signs in with Microsoft and approves the access. From then on the agent acts as them. Nothing for you to connect in the Microsoft admin center.
That’s it. Cobalt hosts the Microsoft connection, so there’s no app registration, client secret, or admin consent to manage.

​
How writes stay safe

Write tools run under the same guardrails every Cobalt integration gets:
  • Confirmation before risky actions. Sending mail and cancelling a meeting always show you exactly what’s about to happen and wait for your go-ahead.
  • Look before it changes. The agent must read a specific message, event, or task before it edits or cancels it — and if that item changed in the meantime, it re-checks first, so it never acts on a stale or wrong item.
  • It reports what actually happened, with a link to the sent mail, the new event, or the updated task — not just what it intended.
  • Editing is limited to safe fields (flag or categorize a message, reschedule an event, complete a task). You control which fields the agent may change on the integration’s Capabilities tab.

​
Troubleshooting

“Please authorize Microsoft.” Each person authorizes once, and again if you later enable a tool that needs a new permission (for example, turning on send after launching read-only). Approve the prompt and the agent picks up where it left off.
  • A tool says it’s unavailable. It’s probably switched off. Turn it on per-tool on the integration’s Capabilities tab (writes are off by default).
  • “I couldn’t find any you can access.” The agent only sees the asking user’s own mail and calendar. If something lives in a shared mailbox or another person’s calendar, it’s intentionally out of reach.
  • “Outlook is busy, try again shortly.” Microsoft briefly rate-limited the request; it clears on its own in a few seconds.
  • An attachment came back as a link only. Very large attachments and non-text file types are returned as a link to open in Outlook rather than inlined for the agent to read.
  • A recipient is ambiguous. If a name matches more than one person, the agent asks which one before sending — enable the People module so it can resolve names to addresses reliably.

​
FAQ

No. Cobalt hosts the Microsoft sign-in, and all of Outlook’s permissions are ones each user can grant for themselves — so there’s no app registration, client secret, or tenant-admin consent.
No. It acts only on the signed-in user’s own mailbox, calendar, contacts, and tasks. Shared mailboxes and delegate calendars are out of scope.
No. Sending mail and cancelling meetings always show you the details and wait for confirmation. Sending is also off until an admin enables it.
The integration is a set of tools an agent uses inside a conversation on another channel (web, Slack, Teams, voice). The email channel — a separate feature — is about holding the conversation itself over email. They’re unrelated.
Yes. With Calendar (and People) enabled, it checks attendees’ free/busy, proposes a time, and — after you confirm — creates the event and sends the invitations.