Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ with AI Agents in Office Apps

Microsoft has unveiled Agent Mode in Excel and Word for users to generate documents and spreadsheets with simple prompts. The company also announced a new Office Agent in Copilot chat powered by Anthropic’s AI models that can generate PowerPoint presentations and Word documents.

“Agent Mode delivers AI that can ‘speak Excel’ natively. It’s built on the richness of Excel artifacts and OpenAI’s latest reasoning models—democratizing access to expert-level capabilities and making advanced modeling approachable for most everyone. These breakthroughs allow Agent Mode to not only generate outputs, but also evaluate results, fix issues, and repeat the process until the outcome is verified. It’s like you’re handing off work to an Excel expert—while you steer and guide,” Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group noted in a blog post. 

The company said that Copilot in Excel Agent Mode showed an accuracy of 57.2 percent on the SpreadsheetBench benchmark which measures how well AI models perform at tasks based on spreadsheets. The score surpassed OpenAI’s o3, ChatGPT Agent and Claude Files Opus 4.1 while still ranking lower than Humans who scored 71.3% accuracy. 

Users can create a financial report for a business with breakdown of revenue across product lines or create a monthly household budget tracker with the help of Agent Mode in Excel. 

Meanwhile, Agent Mode in Word can help users write drafts, make suggestions and ask clarifying questions. Microsoft said the writing process will feel more like “a dialogue than a task,” because of Agent Mode. 

Office Agent on Copilot chat will also be available for users outside of the Office apps. “PowerPoint is one of the most used tools for creating presentations, but over the last two years, AI has often fallen short when creating slides. Office Agent changes that. Office Agent creates tasteful, well-structured PowerPoint decks and well-researched Word documents,” the blog added. 

Users need to define their goal clearly after which the agent conducts research and generates slides while also conducting quality checks on them. 

Microsoft has already brought in Anthropic’s AI models on to GitHub Copilot and Copilot Studio last week. 

Agent Mode in Copilot for Excel and Word will both be available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers while Agent Model in Excel and Word is only available in the web versions at launch, with desktop support coming soon. Office Agent will also available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in the U.S.