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Microsoft is trying to make 'vibe working' a thing

Microsoft is taking inspiration from the AI-driven workflows of "vibe coding" and has now set out to make "vibe working" a thing (yes, those are the words the company chose.) Does AI in the workplace even lead to worthwhile outputs? Does it mortgage our brains' ability to learn? There are many seemingly critical question unanswered. But in the meantime, sure: vibe working it is.
Using Office Agent within Office apps or Copilot chat, users can begin a document with a single prompt and then work iteratively alongside Copilot to develop a finished product. Microsoft says this is the "new pattern of work for human-agent collaboration." The Agent Mode tool supports Excel and Word workflows, and Microsoft says PowerPoint support is coming soon; Office Agent works with PowerPoint and Word, with Excel coming soon.
The company waxes poetic about the "full power of Excel" being available only to expert users and promises that an Agent Mode that can "speak Excel" will change all that. In data shared as part of the announcement, Microsoft said that Copilot Agent Mode in Excel achieved 57.2 percent accuracy on the SpreadsheetBench benchmark. This is compared to a 71.3 percent human score, though it's not clear if that's for average users, Excel power users or how many human users that score is derived from. Still — not great numbers!
Agent Mode also works in Word to summarize, edit and of course help to create entire drafts (though its unclear what those relative accuracy rates are.) Both the Excel and Word Agent Modes are powered by OpenAI's latest models. Office Agent in Copilot chat is powered by Anthropic models and can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents in what Microsoft calls a "chat-first experience."
Agent Mode for Excel and Word, as well as Office Agent, are available today through the Frontier program. Agent Mode is currently limited to the web-based versions of Word and Excel and is coming to desktop soon.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsoft-is-trying-to-make-vibe-working-a-thing-163334367.html?src=rss