Microsoft debuts ‘vibe working’ with Agent Mode, Office Agent launch in Microsoft 365 Copilot
The new Agent Mode from Microsoft enhances Excel and Word, allowing users to create documents through natural language prompts. It offers functionalities like output evaluation and issue fixing, leveraging OpenAI's models to improve productivity.
After providing users the chance to create apps with natural language prompts in GitHub earlier this year, Microsoft is bringing more of its "vibe coding" features to its more mainstream apps. The tech giant on Monday announced a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word which allows users to generate spreadsheets and documents using its AI.
“In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts,” Sumit Chauhan, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft's Office Product Group wrote in a blog post.
Microsoft says Agent Mode not only generates outputs but will “evaluate results, fix issues, and repeat the process until the outcome is verified.” The new agent mode uses OpenAI's models in order to be “democratizing access to expert-level capabilities.”
Microsoft also shared a list of ways users could use the new Agent Mode in Word and Excel — access to PowerPoint coming soon. The company gave examples of using it for financial analysis, loan calculations, updating monthly reports, clean up documents, and personal budgeting.
As per SpreadsheetBench results shared by Microsoft, its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy of 57.2 percent, which while still being lower than human accuracy of 71.3 percent, is higher than the accuracy of Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT, ChatGPT agent, and Claude Files Opus 4.1.
Microsoft's New Office Agent
The company is also introducing a new Office Agent which creates Word and PowerPoint documents using simple natural language prompts.
“Office Agent creates polished PowerPoint presentations and ready-to-use Word documents from chat in Copilot, and coming soon to Excel,” Chauhan says.
The new tool is powered by Anthropic's agent, the main OpenAI rival that Microsoft has grown accustomed to using in its new features.
Microsoft says Office Agent can understand the specific needs within the prompt of the user like file length, visual theme, key focus areas, and target audience.
It is also capable of conducting web research to gather relevant information using its reasoning capabilities and provide a live preview of the slides.
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