"Driven by OpenAI's GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel, and it allows the creation of complex documents and spreadsheets from user prompts. It's called "agent" mode because it doesn't just work from the prompt in a single step; rather, it plans multi-step work and runs a validation loop in the hopes of ensuring quality. It's only available in the web versions of Word and Excel at present, but the plan is to bring it to native desktop applications later."
"There's also the similarly named Office Agent for Copilot. Based on Anthropic models, this feature is built into Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant chatbot, and it too can generate documents from prompts-specifically, Word or PowerPoint files. Office Agent doesn't run through all the steps as Agent Mode, but Microsoft believes it offers a dramatic improvement over prior, OpenAI-driven document-generation capabilities in Copilot, which users complained were prone to all sorts of problems and shortcomings. It is available first in the Frontier Program for Microsoft 365 subscribers."
Agent Mode in Word and Excel uses OpenAI's GPT-5 to create complex documents and spreadsheets from plain-text prompts. The mode plans multi-step tasks and runs a validation loop to help ensure output quality. Agent Mode is currently limited to web versions, with native desktop support planned later. Microsoft also provides Office Agent for Copilot, built on Anthropic models, which can produce Word and PowerPoint files but does not perform the same multi-step validation. Office Agent is launching first in the Frontier Program for Microsoft 365 subscribers. Microsoft labels the resulting workflow approach "vibe working."
Read at Ars Technica
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