Microsoft Introduces “Vibe Working” to Excel and Word

Microsoft is betting that the same “vibe coding” trend that made app-building accessible to non-programmers can do the same for office work.

The company today introduced Agent Mode in Excel and Word and a new Office Agent in Copilot chat, both designed to turn prompts into complex documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” said Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. “In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.”

At the product level, Agent Mode uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 to handle multi-step planning in Excel and Word, showing users a transparent breakdown of its reasoning in a sidebar. Microsoft stressed that it built in validation loops to ensure spreadsheets remain “auditable, refreshable, and verifiable.” Early benchmarks place Agent Mode at 57.2 percent accuracy on SpreadsheetBench, better than Shortcut.ai and Claude Files Opus 4.1 but still below the 71.3 percent human benchmark.

Agent Mode in Word pushes beyond summarization tools into what Chauhan calls “vibe writing”—a conversational drafting system where Copilot drafts, suggests refinements, and highlights what’s missing. The new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic’s models, takes on PowerPoint and Word creation, offering structured slide decks with live previews and built-in web research.

“Productivity is our DNA, we’re Office,” Chauhan said. “While others will try to replicate us, there is no substitute for the real thing.”

For markets, these moves highlight a calculated hedge. Microsoft has leaned heavily on OpenAI, but by threading Anthropic’s models into GitHub Copilot, Office Agent, and Copilot Studio, the company is broadening its AI portfolio. That diversification could reassure enterprise customers wary of overreliance on a single provider. Yet it also raises questions for investors about the cost and complexity of maintaining parallel partnerships, especially as Anthropic’s models run on Amazon Web Services rather than Microsoft’s Azure.

The 57.2 percent accuracy rate in Excel is another detail financial analysts may seize on. For enterprise buyers, the number shows meaningful progress over rivals but still underscores the risk of errors in mission-critical areas like finance and compliance. Analysts suggest early adoption may skew toward use cases where errors carry lower stakes—drafting reports or presentations—before finance chiefs and auditors are comfortable entrusting balance sheets to Agent Mode.

Meanwhile, investors will likely parse the rollout strategy. Microsoft signals a controlled entry aimed at testing scale and reliability before pushing deeper into the desktop suite, where most enterprise workloads still reside, by confining Agent Mode to the web versions of Excel and Word at launch. That may slow adoption in the near term but could be read by markets as a risk-mitigation tactic designed to protect Office’s core reputation.

Agent Mode and Office Agent arrive as startups flood the market with AI-native productivity tools. Microsoft’s counter is not just integration but brand trust—positioning Copilot as a digital consultant capable of doing “what a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.” Enterprise buyers weighing vendor sprawl versus bundled reliability could see this as a reason to keep their spend anchored in the Microsoft ecosystem, a factor that investors may interpret as a defensive but stabilizing moat around Office’s recurring revenue streams.

Agent Mode in Excel and Word, alongside Office Agent in Copilot chat, launches today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers in the US. Desktop support will follow in the months ahead.