Microsoft has launched Agent Mode in Excel and Word, alongside Office Agent in Copilot chat, marking a significant expansion of AI capabilities within Microsoft 365. These new features introduce what the company calls “vibe working”, enabling users to collaborate with AI through iterative, prompt-driven workflows for creating spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.
“Agent Mode delivers AI that can ‘speak Excel’ natively,” said Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. By integrating Excel’s intricate data structures with OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, the company aims to make advanced modeling accessible to a broader audience. Users can leverage these tools for financial analyses, loan calculations, or even household budgeting, without requiring expert-level proficiency in Excel. This democratization of AI-driven analysis seeks to empower users across industries and personal use cases alike.
Complementing Agent Mode, Office Agent in Copilot chat extends AI assistance into a chat-first interface for Word and PowerPoint. Powered by Anthropic models, Office Agent helps users generate well-structured documents and presentations seamlessly. From drafting project summaries to compiling market trends decks, the feature addresses previous gaps in AI slide creation, delivering outputs that are both “tasteful and well-structured,” according to Microsoft.
These additions reflect Microsoft’s broader vision for AI-enhanced productivity, where iterative collaboration with intelligent agents enables faster, more accurate creation and analysis of complex content. By combining natural language prompts with deep structural understanding, the tools allow users to refine and customize outputs dynamically, encouraging experimentation while ensuring precision.
Microsoft highlights that the Agent Mode and Office Agent updates are designed to complement existing Copilot workflows, giving knowledge workers, analysts, and students alike the ability to handle complex tasks with fewer manual steps. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into daily workflows, these tools aim to bridge the gap between expert-level modeling and accessible productivity solutions for all users.
With these releases, Microsoft continues to advance its vision of AI-powered productivity, making sophisticated spreadsheet analyses, document drafting, and presentation creation more intuitive, collaborative, and widely attainable.
