Vibe Working: Introducing Agent Mode and Office Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot (www.microsoft.com)

Microsoft announced "Agent Mode" in Word and Excel and an "Office Agent" for Copilot chat, bringing agentic, multi-step AI workflows into Microsoft 365. Agent Mode (Excel first, Word now, PowerPoint soon) uses OpenAI’s latest reasoning models to operate directly on native Office artifacts—writing formulas, creating sheets, visualizations, drafting and styling documents, evaluating outputs, fixing issues and iterating until results are verified. Office Agent (powered by Anthropic models) brings a chat-first experience that clarifies intent, performs web-based research with visible chains of thought, runs code-generation and quality checks, and produces ready-to-share PowerPoint decks and Word documents with live slide previews and easy handoff to apps. This is significant because it moves beyond single-step prompt completion to an orchestrated human-agent workflow—democratizing advanced Excel modeling, speeding iterative writing in Word, and raising expectations for reliable, explainable agent behavior in productivity tools. Technical highlights include native artifact manipulation, iterative validation loops, chain-of-thought transparency, and use of different LLM providers for specific tasks. Availability starts today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed and Personal/Family subscribers (web first; desktop coming soon; Office Agent initially in U.S. English). For AI/ML practitioners, this showcases real-world agent architectures, multi-model orchestration, and practical demands for verification, data governance and prompt design in production productivity systems.