Microsoft is jumping on the vibe coding bandwagon with "vibe working," its name for adding AI agents to the online Office suite to help you complete your work.
On Monday, Redmond said that it's adding an OpenAI-powered Agent Mode for Word and Excel that will create documents based on existing material and extract data from spreadsheets for reports and financial analysis, all with a few sentences of prompts.
For Word users, Microsoft is promising "vibe writing," drawing on existing documents to assemble reports and proposals, checking drafts for clarity and style, and suggesting refinements along the way.
The Excel agent is designed to take existing spreadsheets and analyze the data, build reports, and visualize data. Redmond says it and OpenAI can "speak Excel" and produce somewhat accurate results.
According to Redmond's own blog post, Microsoft's Agent Mode for Excel scored a 57.2 percent accuracy rate using the established SpreadsheetBench benchmark, but that's significantly lower than the 71.3 percent humans manage on average in the same tests. While Microsoft says Agent Mode outperforms other AI engines, that's still a significant shortfall, and one that threatens the possibility of yet more workslop filling our inboxes.
"We don't optimize for benchmarks, we optimize for real user jobs in Excel. That means solving messy, ambiguous, and complex tasks that reflect how people actually work," said Trevor O'Brien, VP of product at Microsoft, defending the results.
"And while SpreadsheetBench is a strong signal, it doesn’t capture everything that makes Excel powerful — like dynamic arrays, PivotTables, charts, and formatting — or the customer need for refreshable, auditable, and verifiable solutions."
Microsoft also debuted a new Office Agent in Copilot, but it uses Anthropic rather than the OpenAI engine. Employing a chat-based format, users can generate Word documents and PowerPoint presentations based on publicly available information from the web.
Qi Zhang, Microsoft's corporate VP of AI in Asia, claimed that the generated slide decks would be "tasteful," thanks to the code's use of a "taste-driven development (TDD) paradigm." He said that, on the General AI Assistants (GAIA) benchmark, the Office agent outpaced competitors Genspark, Manus, and OpenAI's own Deep research tool.
This is the second time in a week that Microsoft has shown its fondness for Anthropic. Last Wednesday, Microsoft added Claude Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4 as model options in Copilot Studio and the Researcher agent, and Redmond teased that more was to come.
This increasingly close relationship is another sign that Microsoft is moving away from OpenAI - a company that it has sunk over $10 billion into. And while Microsoft has its own AI development program, it's showing an increasing willingness to try other options, even adding Grok to Azure for coding purposes.
Microsoft is making Agent Mode in Excel and Word available on Monday on the web for Frontier program Copilot 365 customers, and plans to add it to desktop apps in the future. Redmond currently offers Office Agent in Copilot only to US customers with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriptions, for the time being. ®
Source: The register