Image: jroballo/Adobe Stock
Copilot AI’s Agent Mode in Word and for Excel is available to subscribers who sign up for Microsoft’s Frontier program.
Microsoft has expanded its Copilot AI assistant to Office. Copilot is designed to work alongside your Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, providing assistance and producing polished final versions.
The new features were rolled out on Monday for users in Microsoft’s Frontier program. The program is open to commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription.
Three AI feature sets are now available in Office:
In Excel, the AI agent can autonomously analyze data, use formulas, and create new visualizations of spreadsheet data. Microsoft stated that it uses OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, automatically switching between models, including GPT-5, based on the context.
Microsoft shared an example prompt in its announcement blog: “Run a full analysis on this sales data set. I want to understand some important insights to help me make decisions about my business. Make it visual.”
Users will need to install the Excel Labs add-in to use Agent Mode in Copilot. Agent Mode is currently only available on the web, with a desktop version expected soon.
In Word, Copilot can summarize documents or extract specific information, according to Microsoft. Agent Mode enables the AI to update data tables, generate next steps based on a project document, or apply edits across an entire document.
Microsoft calls this “vibe writing,” but its capabilities aren’t much different than the suggestions GPT-5 provides for next steps. Agent Mode in Copilot for Word conveniently sits within Word itself, though, so it might be a time-saver for Microsoft power users.
Like Agent Mode in Excel, Word’s Agent Mode is currently only available in the web version. Microsoft said desktop functionality is coming soon.
Separate but related is the Office Agent in Copilot, which Microsoft says was developed in response to demand for a chat-first approach to work. Within the Copilot chat box, Office Agent lets users create PowerPoint presentations or Word documents.
The deep reasoning capabilities of the underlying AI models mean that reports from Office Agent can be more thorough than those created by older large language models.
To use Office Agent in Copilot, select Office Agent (Frontier) from the navigation pane in the Copilot web app.
Anthropic just released its most powerful AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, which can code autonomously for more than 30 hours.
Megan Crouse has a decade of experience in business-to-business news and feature writing, including as first a writer and then the editor of Manufacturing.net. Her news and feature stories have appeared in Military & Aerospace Electronics, Fierce Wireless, TechRepublic, and eWeek. She copyedited cybersecurity news and features at Security Intelligence. She holds a degree in English Literature and minored in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
