Microsoft Office gets an AI agent mode

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Microsoft has a new buzzword for the corporate dictionary: “vibe working.” 

If “vibe-coding” promised to turn your half-baked app ideas into actual software, vibe working wants to rescue the rest of us from the slow agony of spreadsheets and Word docs. 

The concept, unveiled this week, is basically AI-powered grunt work for Office, only with a friendlier name and a lot more magic under the hood.

At the heart of it is Agent Mode, a new Copilot feature rolling out to Word, Excel, and soon PowerPoint. Imagine telling Excel, “Run a full analysis on this sales data set. 

Give me key insights and make it visual,” and then watching as formulas, graphs, and charts appear like a caffeinated intern just pulled an all-nighter. 

In Word, you can dump a pile of numbers and notes and have the AI spit back a neatly formatted report that actually looks like something you’d present to your boss. 

No pivot tables, no late-night Googling for “how to write a business summary,” no tears.

It’s basically Microsoft’s earlier Deep Research and Researcher agents, tools that compile and summarize data, now baked directly into Office. And the timing is no accident. 

Just days ago, Anthropic showed off a Claude chatbot trick that can create or edit Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and even PDF files without you opening them. 

Claude will soon coexist inside Office alongside OpenAI’s GPT models, meaning Microsoft’s productivity suite is about to be an AI battleground.

For now, Office Agent is debuting for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Personal or Family subscribers on the web, with desktop updates coming soon. 

Microsoft promises it can churn out “tasteful, well-structured” PowerPoint decks and Word docs, which is corporate-speak for “you’ll finally have slides that don’t look like clip-art explosions.”

The bottom line? Vibe working is Microsoft’s pitch for a future where spreadsheets practically write themselves and PowerPoints assemble on command, leaving you more time to, well, vibe.

Will Microsoft’s Agent Mode actually save time for office workers, or will it just create new problems as people struggle to verify AI-generated reports and presentations? Do you think “vibe working” represents genuine productivity gains, or are we replacing the skill of understanding data with the skill of prompting AI to do it for us? Tell us below in the comments, or reach us via our Twitter or Facebook.