Microsoft launches 'vibe working' in Excel and Word (www.theverge.com)

Microsoft today rolled out an "Agent Mode" for Excel and Word — what it calls "vibe working" — plus an Office Agent inside Copilot chat that can produce PowerPoint decks and Word docs from a conversational prompt. Agent Mode uses agentic planning and reasoning (breaking complex tasks into sub‑agents and showing each step in a sidebar) to turn brief prompts into board‑ready spreadsheets and documents; Microsoft says it can produce work "a first‑year consultant would do" in minutes. The Copilot chat Office Agent, powered by Anthropic models, adds web research and live slide previews to generate structured decks. Microsoft positions this as a major productivity advance that makes advanced Excel operations more accessible while keeping outputs auditable, refreshable and verifiable. Technically, Agent Mode inside Office uses OpenAI's GPT‑5 to orchestrate task decomposition and execution, and Microsoft reports a 57.2% accuracy on SpreadsheetBench — ahead of several rivals but below human accuracy (71.3%). The feature is web‑only at launch (desktop coming later) and available today in Microsoft’s Frontier program and to 365 Personal/Family subscribers in the US. For the AI/ML community, the release highlights increased reliance on multi‑model compositions (OpenAI + Anthropic), tighter validation loops for high‑stakes data tasks, and the ongoing need for robust benchmarks and auditability when agentic systems manipulate enterprise data.