Microsoft is rolling out a new set of features for Excel, Word and Copilot that enable subscribers to tell an AI-powered assistant to generate documents instead of doing the work themselves.
This is significant because it's a big step forward in Microsoft's ongoing mission to inject AI into seemingly every aspect of its business. The company helped kickstart the tech industry's current AI craze by launching Bing with Copilot early in 2023, and later that year, Microsoft put a Copilot AI agent right on your Windows 11 desktop that you can chat with any time to do things like change system settings.
This latest update adds a new Office Agent you can chat with inside Copilot to generate PowerPoint decks and Word documents using data pulled from the Internet. There's also a new Agent Mode for the web versions of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word going live this week for subscribers of the Microsoft 365 Frontier Program.
If you're not familiar, the Frontier Program is a bit like the Windows Insider Program in that it allows Microsoft 365 subscribers to opt into early access to AI features before they're made widely available. This week, Frontier members are getting a glimpse of what Microsoft pitches as the next step forward in human-AI collaboration after vibe coding: vibe working.
"Today, we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat," is how Microsoft Office VP Sumit Chauhan opens a Microsoft 365 blog post announcing the new features, which basically give Microsoft 365 subscribers access to a chatbot that can do basic tasks in the web versions of Excel and Word, with a PowerPoint version soon to come.
As a writer, this seems more exciting as an Excel upgrade, since I've always had a hard time making heads or tails of the many functions and formulae that make great spreadsheets. Microsoft claims the new Agent Mode in Excel can effectively act on prompts like "create a financial monthly close report for a bike shop business, including a breakdown of product lines across VTB, VTF, sequential, and year-over-year growth", and if it can do so reliably without making mistakes, I may never need to learn how to budget.
The new Agent Mode in Word works in a similar fashion, giving you a Copilot chatbot in the web version of Word, you can ask to do things like update tables in a document or fix formatting issues. And while Microsoft has yet to debut the promised PowerPoint Agent Mode, the new Office Agent you can talk to in Copilot chat is capable of generating PowerPoint presentations based on your requests.
All of these new features are rolling out now to Microsoft 365 subscribers in the Frontier program, and if you're one of them, you should be able to access them via Copilot and Word. However, in order to access the new Agent Mode in Excel, you need to jump through the additional hoop of downloading the Excel Labs add-on from Microsoft.
Bottom line
Is this the next generation of spellcheck, or an existential threat to accountants and writers everywhere?
It's hard to know until these AI assistants make their way out of the Frontier program and into the real world, but I have a hunch humans aren't outdated just yet. The promise that anyone can code anything by telling a chatbot to do it (aka "vibe coding") hasn't revolutionized the software market just yet, but we'll have to wait and see how willing businesses and families are to trust Microsoft's AI agents with their data.
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