Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - Ep 621: Microsoft’s new Agent mode: Microsoft marketing or Future of Work in Windows?

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Is this the AI agent we've all been waiting for? 🤔Maybe. Microsoft just unveiled their highly capable Agent Mode and Office Agent. Capabilities? Through the roof. Execution, rollout and availability? ummmm......Join us as we cut through the fluff on these new AI agents from Microsoft and separate the game-changing features from the shiny marketing. Microsoft’s new Agent mode: Microsoft marketing or Future of Work in Windows? An Everyday AI Chat with Jordan WilsonNewsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion on LinkedIn: Thoughts on this? Join the convo on LinkedIn and connect with other AI leaders.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: [e-mail] with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:Microsoft Agent Mode vs. Office Agent OverviewAgent Mode Access: Enterprise vs. Personal LicensesOffice Agent Rollout Limitations and CritiqueMulti-Step Orchestration in Excel and WordMicrosoft Copilot Integration and User ConfusionAI-Powered Document Automation Use CasesModel Comparison: OpenAI vs. Claude in CopilotFuture of Work With Microsoft 365 Copilot AgentsTimestamps:00:00 "Microsoft's New AI Agents Unveiled"05:42 Microsoft Copilot Access Confusion08:54 Excel's Superior Data Visualization Handling11:52 "Excel Agent Mode: Slow, Limited Access"16:09 "Navigating Copilot and ChatGPT"20:06 Enterprise Copilot: Enhanced Research Features23:19 AI-Powered Presentation Generation25:44 Microsoft's Multi-Model AI Strategy29:01 "Microsoft Vibe Working Critique"30:41 "Improve Microsoft Co-Pilot's Usability"35:42 "Excel Copilot: Promising, Not Ready"37:32 "Microsoft Copilot Studio Overview"Keywords:Microsoft Copilot, agent mode, office agents, Microsoft 365, Copilot agent mode, future of work in Windows, autonomous multi step orchestration, Office Agent, Excel agent mode, Word agent mode, Copilot chat, multi model strategy, OpenAI reasoning models, GPT-5, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Claude Opus 4.1, Anthropic Claude, enterprise rollout, personal Copilot, family Copilot, commercial Copilot license, web only, Excel Labs, multi file updatSend Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the Everyday Podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Microsoft just released two new agents, agent mode and their office agent.

And on the surface, and in the demo videos, they look pretty good and extremely useful. So are these new agents the future of work if you're a Windows user and Microsoft 365 co-pilot user? or is this just another case of Microsoft's marketing looking really good and millions of people won't know how to use these agents? We're going to dive in and hopefully find that out today on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'all? My name's Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily news that are helping everyday business leaders

like you and me not just keep up with what's happening in the world of AI, but how we can make sense of it, grow our companies and our. careers. If that's what you're trying to do, it starts here with the unedited, unscripted, live stream podcast. But if you want to take it to the next level, make sure to go to our website, your everyday AI.com. There, we recap each day's podcast in our free daily newsletter. And there's also like 620 plus episodes you can go listen to by category, watch the video, all that good stuff on our website. So, yeah, and AI news went straight up bonkers today, y'all i mean we we heard about uh you know soror two we got claude uh four five uh you know these new agents

right so much happening in a i news today so make sure you go check out the newsletter but we're here to talk about microsoft's new agent their agent mode and office agents let's be honest they look great they look great but the real question is will anyone be able to actually use them and access them and it's high take Tuesday. So I've got some takes on that. But the first thing is this is you guys wanted this, right? So, you know, if you are a longtime podcast listener and maybe some of the episodes, you're like, hey, dude, this stinks. Well, go sign up for our newsletter. I do a lot of polls in the daily newsletter asking you all what you want to hear. So if you want to hear more of something, well, go,

make sure you read our newsletter and vote in the polls. But overwhelmingly, you all, even more so than the new chat, GPT pulse, which I thought everyone would want to hear about. But you all, want to hear about the new co-pilot agent mode. So today we're going to go over Microsoft's announcement of agent mode and their office agent, tell you who can use them, how and what work they can start to automate. And I'm going to tell you if this is actually a fundamental shift in how millions of Windows workers are going to work or if it's just some cool marketing and a nice little feature that may or may not be useful.

Let's get straight to it. I won't make you wait any longer. My hot take, well, Microsoft made a huge marketing mistake here. They're leaning into this thing called vibe working, which seemed kind of out of left field. And when we dive into these two new agents a little bit more, you'll probably see what I'm talking about. Is this true vibe working? Not really. Is Microsoft in prime position to maybe be the vibe working platform of the future?

Probably. But I don't think this is it. Also, this is extremely useful for enterprises that have all of their data in line. That's who I think this is ultimately for, but also not really. Anyways, if you are an enterprise company with your data in Microsoft 365, this will actually change how you work. Well, once everyone gets access, because that's another thing. I think Microsoft sacrificed clarity and user experience in just chasing some new.

agents that they can put on their website and say, we release these new agents. Well, there's a lot of things that I think just were bad, right? So at least right now, they're web only. There's no commercial accounts for some of them. So let's just even just take a look at this. So the agent mode, there's a different agent mode in Excel and a different agent mode in Word. But right now, those are online, but they are for both kind of personal. So personal and family subscribers.

So you have to be a Microsoft 365 copilot subscriber. So you have to have obviously Microsoft 365 license, a Microsoft 365 copilot license. But to use agent mode in Word or Excel, you can have either a normal commercial type of license or a family or personal subscription. Here's what's weird. Office agent. What the heck? This is the one I was most excited. about. And at least right now, it's only available to personal and family subscribers. It's not

available to licensed customers, which makes absolutely no sense. Yes, this has got to be the hottest take a ball, like Microsoft. Why? Right? When you release something called office agent, you know, you're known for office and the majority of your enterprise customers can't use said office agent. Come on. Like, you don't need 220,000 employees to know that that's a terrible mistake. They shouldn't have done this. This is going to make what is already a convoluted co-pilot experience even more full

of webs to untangle. I spent honestly three hours trying to understand how different groups of people get access to these different agents and how it is extremely confusing, which is unfortunately on brand for Microsoft copilot, which is sad because once their products, once you get them to work and you can give everyone access, co-pilot's great, right? I think unfortunately, especially in the AI circles

where us AI dorks are running, co-pilot doesn't get a lot of credit, although I think they should. You know, especially now since they're starting to use the GPT5 models from OpenAI, They just started rolling out Claude models. If we're going to be talking about that here in these agents as well. So Microsoft should be getting more credit,

but the user experience is terrible. Getting people access to at least these agents is going to be disjointed. And it's going to be such a delayed rollout, it seems. So you only get one big shot if you have come out with something called agent mode or office agent. And I think Microsoft squandered it. Sorry. All right, but let's talk about these two new agents. So this new, there's no, sometimes Microsoft says, you know, this is wave one, wave two, you know, so there's no name anymore.

So I'm just kind of call this the September 29th release because that's what we have. All right. So anyways, what the heck is new and what are these agents? Well, they add autonomous multi-step orchestration inside of office apps right now on the web. So hopefully that changes. Agent mode. So again, the two different agents, agent mode and office agent. Agent mode embeds iterative task execution directly inside Excel and Word right now. We'll see if it rolls out to their other office products in the near future. And office agent, so I know that's kind of confusing. Actually, agent mode works inside of office's products, but office mode works inside co-pilot chat. Another naming thing. Come on, Microsoft. This is confusing. But anyways, office agent works inside of co-pilot chats and it creates complete documents with research-backed outputs. And we're going to do, I'm going to show a little demo here in a couple of minutes of

that one. So what can you do now? That's ultimately what it's about, right? It's like, okay, cool, you can throw a million agents, you know, at all your users. Well, what the heck can you do today that you couldn't do yesterday or once, you know, everyone gets access to these agents? What can you do that you couldn't do before. Well, a lot of things. And I've been testing out the one in Excel and it's actually pretty good. Like even for some of the GBT5 thinking, you know, I was trying on the new Claude 45 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro. I was trying some data visualization things. And actually Microsoft agent in Excel, the agent mode is handled it the best because all the other models, just kind of cut off a certain amount of data.

Obviously, I was throwing thousands and thousands of rows of Excel data at it. And luckily, Excel handled it better than the other large language models. Granted, that's not what the other front end models are necessarily good at, right, handling 50,000 rows of an Excel sheet. Not always the best use case, but hey, if I'm testing it, if the agent mode in Excel couldn't handle that, then I'd be like, this is a problem. but it actually did really well. So here's some things that you can do.

In Excel, you can do financial models, loan calculators, visual analysis and validation without expertise. That's the other thing, right? You no longer have to Google for 10 minutes or Google AI mode for two minutes on how the heck do I write this formula. Now it actually just works inside of copilot. And you can actually talk to it and it actually works, right? Whereas before people are like, wait, why doesn't this work?

Well, it does now. Inside Word, you can do multi-file updates, structured drafting, and polished formatting through dialogue. And the office agent has a chat first generation of presentations and documents with live previews and checks. So let's talk about the agent mode first. Again, this is the one that works in Word and Excel right now. So multi-step execution, that's the big thing. And it uses the agent mode uses OpenAI's latest reasoning models to modify documents and workbooks directly. Not sure which version of GPT5 it uses or if it maybe uses the older, you know, 0304 mini.

We're not sure. It did just say it uses their latest reasoning models. So we hope that's maybe, I don't know, GPT5, GPT5 thinking. Not sure. I kind of looked under the hood. I looked at the chain of the chain of thought summary from agent mode in Excel. There's no identifying information aside from it's using a reasoning model from opening I. But it does do a really good job I thought of planning, executing, evaluating, fixing issues.

And then you can repeat and iterate until the outcomes are verified. So it is kind of simple to just chat with the agent mode, at least in Excel. That's the only one I was able to demo. However, there were some weird issues, right? So a couple of things that would randomly merge cells, which is not good. So I had to like reprompt and tell it specifically not to merge cells. That's probably a pretty big bug that Microsoft should have squashed. I was looking it up and there weren't a lot of people, you know, online that had been talking about this.

But I saw other people had this issue. And the problem is, is when you're using this thinking model and it actually does a really good job. But the problem is it's very slow. So if you do have a couple of errors, you know, you're going to have to kind of get your prompts right. And if you're working with the same type of data or the same type of spreadsheets, you know, hopefully you can find those errors early on, you know, do some basic prompt engineering and get around them in the future.

All right. So that is agent mode. And then, well, who can actually use it? So like I said right now, in agent mode, this is for enterprise. co-pilot license and personal family subscribers via the frontier early access program, which is free and pretty much automatic to get in. So Excel, though, on the web, you have to use it on the web, and it requires the Excel Labs add-in, and then you select agent mode.

I have a screenshot of this, so I'll walk you through it. And then it's web only for Excel and Word in desktop support is coming soon. Another big bummer. So if you are using office agent, you will see it is in the upper left hand corner. When you choose your agents, you will see that agent there. Oh, I think I had that screenshot out of order, but that's fine. All right. So what's new in Microsoft's new office agent?

All right. So that's the one that you use inside of co-pilot chat. And right now, yeah, doesn't work with Enterprise. customers makes no sense so this has the the chat first agent inside of microsoft 365 co-pilot chat it's powered this one is powered by anthropics uh claude sonnet four and claude opus 4.1 no word yet on if claud's anthropic clods just released sonnet 4.5 will be supported or not but at least we got like actual models uh for claude where we didn't get them uh for open a i So this, it helps to clarify intent.

And then it also researches, previews, and generate polished Word or PowerPoint files right in the chat. So I'll play a demo of it here shortly where we can kind of see a better glimpse of exactly how this one works. So for this one, who can use it? How can you use it and where? Like I said, right now, it's only for personal and family co-pilot subscribers in the U.S. us, which is like no one. It just so happens, that's my plan or my tier. I didn't have access.

Unfortunately, I didn't have access to office agent just yet. I didn't have access to agent mode in Word, but I did have access to agent mode in Excel. So you do, uh, enterprise availability, uh, is scheduled for later phases of the rollout. Like I said, I think Microsoft kind of, kind of missed, miss the mark on that one. Also, English only at launch. And again, accessed via just the Microsoft 365 copilot chat on the web. All right.

So let's talk about agent mode in Excel and agent mode in Word and how you can access those. So for agent mode in Excel, you need to be on Excel in the web. You need to go to the add-ins kind of toolbar at the top of your screen. and then you need to add Excel Labs. Then you will click to use Excel Labs, agent mode, and then you are then using agent mode. So a little different, you won't click the copilot banner. You have to actually go into the add-ins, go into Excel Labs,

and then click agent mode to use agent mode. So a little weird because you would think, okay, well, maybe agent mode in Excel and agent mode and Word, you use them the same way. No, you don't. Another confusing thing, Microsoft. User experience, come on. Like, this should be easy.

This is something that, you know, chat GPT is great on. Obviously, you know, it's way more robust, right, co-pilot, what you can do inside of copilot. You know, it works in like a thousand different apps and chat GPT is just one, right? So obviously it's a little easier. But, y'all, have we not heard of simple toggles, simple drop-downs? Simple drop downs, simple, right, very easy to navigate where to find stuff. It's just difficult to find these agents right now inside Microsoft's ecosystem.

So on the Word side, so the agent mode in Word, a little different. You don't have to go into any labs or add anything. It should just be in your options toggle on the right hand side when you are talking with copilot. it. And then you there should be a new agent mode frontier, uh, drop down that you would choose. So you know, you can choose researcher, you can choose analyst, you can choose designer. So the very top, there should be a new option for agent mode. So that's how you access the three different agents across the different products. So how did the agent mode products actually work? So they plan, execute, evaluate, fix issues, and repeat until verified. Office agent clarifies. On the other side,

Office agent clarifies intent, performs web research. That's the part that's really cool. And I want to get my hands on. I like how the office agent really does its work. And then it runs quality checks as well. But in each of these different agentic workflows, the new agents from Microsoft, users do steer goals while the agents automate procedural steps and iterations. All right. So podcast audience, you're going to hear now, I'm going to play a quick 54 second demo from Microsoft on their new office agent. So again, this is the one that for whatever reason is ultimately going to be amazing for enterprises, but it's not available to enterprises.

It's only right now, this version, the office agent, is only available to personal and family co-pilot subscribers, which makes no sense. A quick reminder on what it can do. Well, in the Microsoft co-pilot chat interface, which is what we're going to see in this quick little demo, you can build Word docs and PowerPoints. You know, it's first going to ask you clarifying questions.

You can choose template style, multi-step web research, quality checks at every turn. So let's just go ahead and listen in our live stream audience. You should be able to watch the video here. Introducing the new Office Agent in Microsoft 365 co-pilot. The Chat First Way to Build Office artifacts, starting with Word and PowerPoint. Just describe what you need, and Office Agent gets to work. Office Agent begins by asking clarifying questions, personalized to your prompt. such as key focus areas, style, presentation length, and templates.

It then launches multi-step web research to gather and analyze relevant info and images. You can watch as it plans how to create your presentation, executes the plan, and runs quality checks at every step, all while you steer and guide. The output is a polished deck that you can continue to iterate on with copilot, or hand off to PowerPoint and use copilot to make edits in the app, Like changing some text to a bulleted list. Try office agent today and start vibe working with co-pilot.

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So again, let me quickly walk and talk everyone through if you weren't watching the video version of this. So in the office agent, they are inside co-pilot chat and then not having to draw from any files. So you can, using the slash command, you know, you could have it read a Word doc, have it read an Excel sheet, have it read a PowerPoint and then create a new version. But in this instance, in this demo, what they're doing is just having it do some research. So what it does first, it kind of creates an outline. And it goes through task clarification, which is really nice, right? This one feature, I wish all large language models would do this. So some of them kind of do versions of this.

If you're doing deep research and chat GPT, it'll usually ask you two to five clarifying questions. They're open-ended, though, which is fine. You have to type them out. Google Gemini deep research gives you a plan and then you can just approve it or edit it. So what I really like about this office agent is, It's actually really cool, at least in this demo, right? So it breaks down a task clarification and it gives you essentially checkboxes to say. So, you know, in this instance, it says presentation focus.

Then it gives you five different things to check. Data visualization. In this case, there's two different options. Do you want include charts for all key statistics or minimal charts focus on text, right? That's great. If you're putting together a PowerPoint based on web, research, having these four or five quick clarifying questions and then just being able to check something is ultimately going to save 30 minutes, 60 minutes, multiple hours on the

backend, right? And that's just if you are using the normal co-pilot features inside of PowerPoint, let a lot if you're doing this manually, it's going to take way more time. Okay. So then what happens next after you kind of choose from those clarifying questions, then there's you can choose a presentation length. And then there's also some built in themes, right? So you don't have to, you know, be wondering what the heck is this thing going to come look like.

So you can choose for presentation length, brief five to seven slides, standard eight to 12 slides, detailed 13 to 15 slides or comprehensive 16 to 20 sides. Y'all, this is what everyone's wanted out of go pilot for forever. right go do a bunch of research you know ask me a couple of questions and give me a decent looking PowerPoint right this is your you know management consulting 101 this is what management consultants do all right so then after you choose the presentation length after you choose your theme you submit and then at this point this is when it goes out the office agent and it starts to do web crawl here so it does multiple web searches right just like a deep research

would. And again, this version here is powered by Anthropics Claude's models, which are great at agentic research and just agentic work in general. So it goes through, it does a couple of webcrawls, a couple follow-ups looking for more information. In this instance, it's looking at images online and then it's planning the slides. Right. So at each of these iterations, It looks like you can stop and, you know, edit things, but it's starting to plan all of these slides.

It on the right hand side, it's starting to show a preview. You can go in, kind of read the preview. You can also modify it in natural language. So in the demo video, it says, I'll modify slides or sorry, the prompt was remove the image in slide six and turn the bullets into a visual. Great, natural language prompt. So as you see, uh, your PowerPoint slides. being built. If something's not right, you can say simple, hey, slide blank, get rid of this, change this. And it seemingly does it fairly well. And then at the end, it has a decent looking

PowerPoint. Right. So this, you know, from an AI perspective, it's, it's not, you know, at a level of like a gamma or something like that that I think has very clean visuals when it comes to, you know, AI presentations, but again, at least on this demo, fantastic, and I'm very bullish on this, but what the heck?

Why Microsoft, aren't you giving this the people that probably actually want to use it? You're going to force all these enterprises to, you know, get a personal or family co-pilot plan just to start using it. All right. So,

let's keep this thing going and talk about what specific models each one knew. So each agent uses. So like I said, agent mode uses open AI's latest reasoning models. And then office agent, the one I just showed a demo of, which doesn't work in office. It works in co-pilot chat that uses Claude's model. But I do think Microsoft is smart with this multi model strategy, right, using the right model for the right reason, which is actually pretty good on Microsoft, considering they have an equity stake in in Open AI, but they don't in Anthropics. So in one case, they are actually paying ultimately to use a model that they say is better

than the one that they have equity in. So, you know, hats off to Microsoft for presumably doing the right thing. You know, I'm sure their internal testing on this was rigorous, right? Imagine having to be the one to make that call. Hey, you know this model that we have equity stake in? Well, we're not going to use it. for this agent we're going to pay probably a ton of money to use a model from anthropic because it gives better performance so what's this multi-step orchestration and how is this really different well uh this

breaks high level goals into subtasks right so these agents in all the demo videos and we'll be sharing those uh in our newsletter today if you want to go watch those uh it does break it down into multiple step. So in my demoing of the agent mode in Excel, it actually did a really good job of that. And I was fairly impressed. And Excel creates, it can create sheets, formulas, charts, and summaries with validation driven loops. And then in Word, the Word one I wasn't super impressed with, if I'm being honest, the agent mode in Word, I don't know. I would probably much rather use chat gb t canvas mode uh google gemini canvas mode clod artifacts probably not cloud artifacts i'd probably use chat gbt canvas mode or gemini canvas mode uh again microsoft pushing this

whole like vibe writing vibe working no again uh i i probably wouldn't use uh the agent mode in word over the long run uh the only um instance is or the huge value obviously again if you are a heavy Microsoft 365 organization and you have docs that are constantly changing. You can obviously use the slash command in Word, reference multiple docs and create a new doc, pulling key information from your other files that are up to date across your organization. You can't overlook the value add of that. But aside from that, agent mode in Word, agent mode in Excel, loving it, office agent. I will love it once everyone gets access.

because it's going to be super confusing. So let me just tear this apart real quick. Microsoft kind of out of nowhere, just going with this vibe working, right, and getting back to the heart of this episode, right? Is this the new way that millions of people inside Windows are going to work, right? This new agent mode and office, office agent,

or is it just fancy marketing? And this just, I don't know. I don't know what it was that, you know, it was really grinding my gears about this one. It's not nearly as bad as when Apple rebranded Apple intelligence, you know, or they rebranded artificial intelligence and tried to call it Apple intelligence. But I don't know, Microsoft. Vibeworking, right?

The literal headline of their agent mode release on their website said, vibe working, introducing agent mode and office agent in Microsoft 365 copilot. I get what they're going for, right? Like saying, hey, you know, now, especially in office agent, right, where you can just create powerpoints by, you know, natural language prompts and, you know, being able to pull information from across your other Microsoft documents. So I get the concept, but it's not there. It's not there because I know the copilot ecosystem is problematic. I've talked to, and this is not exaggeration, I've been doing this for a long time. I've talked to hundreds of business leaders that are like, yeah, we pay for Microsoft co-pilot licenses, but we can't use them because no one knows how, right?

It's almost like co-pilot is in too many places, but the places where you want to use co-pilot, no one understands it. No one understands the user permissions, right? getting people the right access, people are not sure, oh, should I be using, you know, co-pilot in, you know, M365 chat, should I be using it in teams? Should I be using it inside Microsoft Word? It's almost in way too many places. And, you know, file permissions, admin issues. It's very confusing.

So many large, I'm talking Fortune 500 companies that I've talked to, have. have Microsoft 365 and they're still instead using chat GPT or Gemini because it's confusing. So Microsoft, instead of trying to create a category, right, of like we're the vibe working platform, you know, how about you just make co-pilot work a little bit better, right? And this rollout is exactly what I'm talking about. Why? Why would you roll out this office agent that is like I've said. said. I'd hate to beat the dead horse, but sorry, dead horse, I'm going to beat you one more time.

This is what people I have been wanting Microsoft, right? An easy way to create an actual great, uh, looking, uh, presentation, uh, with an actual agentic experience, right? This multi-step orchestration, working with all of your files, uh, doing multiple steps of research, being able to iterate and, and observe along the way. This is what everyone's yet good luck anyone getting access right because at least according to their release it's not available to the people that i think actually need it and could push this thing forward right and people you know are and i talk to people you know kind of off the record at microsoft all the time and many of them are aware of this and you wonder why more people aren't raving about co-pilot they should be

But this is one of the reasons, right? The rollout is jagged. Permissions are confusing. And the go-to-market is not existing. This is not a strategy. This is a strategy for confusion. And for when it's finally available for everyone else, they're going to be like, wait, this is old.

No, it's not, right? When thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies get access to this, whether that's in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, they're going to be like, wait, this already rolled out and it didn't work for us. So why would we look at it again? You don't get five shots at a grand reopening. You get one. So a little bit more on multi-step orchestration and then we're going to wrap today show up.

So this is where you just state desired outcome. And I do think it's worth talking about again because this is one of the big differences between these new agents and what was already available inside of co-pilot or what was already available inside of co-pilot studio. And this is where Microsoft was, you know, really trying to go hard with this vibe, vibe-working thing. But this is where you just state,

you know, end-user state their desired outcome. And hopefully, co-pilot handles the complex steps conversationalally and iteratively. Hopefully it speeds up, like I said, I was happy with the results that I was doing in agent mode in Excel. But sometimes, like when it merged cells randomly,

I had to wait, like five minutes for it to unmerge those cells. Right. So the iterative nature is great. The multi-step orchestration is great, except if it's really slow. Right. So that's one huge downside. And this does adapt these kind of vibe coding principles to mainstream productivity for

non-experts. Right. So anyone, if you haven't vibe coded, right, that's where all these platforms, I mean, there's dozens, you know, cursor, lovable. Bolt, right? Google has some great ones where you just talk to and you're like, hey, build me an app that does A, B, and C. And then it spits out the first version. You're like, oh, yeah, this is good. But let's, you know, make it, make it cleaner. Let's let's add in a database, et cetera. Right. So you're just literally talking something into existence. So that's what Microsoft is going for here with this new multi-step orchestration in agent mode and office agent. But I just think it's going to fall short a little bit. Limitations. What about that? Well, it's Frontier only preview, so you have to be part of the Frontier program.

It's only web first, which is another downside. I'm guessing that might be one of the reasons why it's not, some of these things aren't rolling out to the full enterprise customers right now. Office agent is limited to US and English during the initial preview phase. And the Excel agent mode, although it did really good, it actually benchmarked really, really well. So I have this benchmark here. This is from the spreadsheet bench accuracy results from Microsoft's website. It actually beat out a lot of the other agents on the spreadsheet bench accuracy results with a 57.2. So the downfall here is, well, still not as good as a human.

A human scores about 71% on the spreadsheet bench accuracy, although the co-pilot in Excel agent mode did much better than all of the the other agents on this benchmark. So it's a step in the right direction, but it's not ready to necessarily replace your data analyst. But I do think, especially for those that are, you know, either number one, creating a ton of PowerPoints, which is a lot of people, or spending a ton of time in Microsoft Excel,

which I know is also a ton of people. That's why you have to pay attention to the unfortunately tiered and delayed rollout because once this becomes available to everyone, I do think it's worth paying attention to. And you might be saying like, well, couldn't you do this before? No. Previous copilot was more of a single turn assistance without any autonomous multi-step orchestration and users had to manually either reprompt from scratch because there was no

iterative and evaluative and fix loops that existed before. But this new release does enable that proactive execution and verification inside of office, apps. So yeah, that's another big difference. You know, maybe you're using, you know, copilot in Excel before. What's the difference? Well, it breaks things down into this multiple step orchestration, but also the iterative nature. Right. So you don't, whereas before, to get better results, you just kind of have to reprompt from scratch. And now you can just say like, yo, change this one thing. Right. In the example of office agent in the demo, it was, you know, Hey, get rid of the picture in slide six and change the bullet points to something more visual, right?

Being able to take just one step out of the multi-step orchestration that the agent did and just change that one thing versus having to reprompt the whole thing from scratch. So obviously, that's a huge update. And then you're like, okay, co-pilot studio. Didn't we have this? No. So although you could probably build a lot of, not a lot, but you could probably build a lot, but you could probably build some of the things that you might use agent mode in Excel, agent mode in Word or Office Agent 4, you could probably build some of these capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

So Microsoft Copilot Studio for people that don't know, it's a low code, sometimes no code platform for building custom organizational agents that then you can use throughout your organization. The biggest difference here, well, Agent Mode and Office agent, they're pre-built. Their end user features requiring no development. It's co-pilot studio, like I said, you got to go in and build it. So agent mode is already pre-built, pre-configured. It's for using. Copilot studio is for building.

So if you're confused, that's kind of the big differentiator. All right. So that's a wrap, but I want to leave you with a couple use cases that you can try today. All right. So agent mode in Excel, you can run a full sales analysis with charts and validated insights from a single prompt. All right. Agent mode and Word. You can update a status report. You can pull data from multiple different files by using the backslash command and referencing those different files. You can do the same thing. Obviously in Excel, Excel's agent mode and then office agent.

So using that inside of chat, once it rolls out to enterprises, will be fantastic. So this is the ability to generate a market trends PowerPoint with live. multi-step validated web research and previewing your slides before making them. All right. I hope this was helpful, y'all. I had personally, I had so many questions about these new Microsoft agents. And if they were more marketing or the future of work, and, well, my hot take is a little of both.

I think this rollout could have been much better by Microsoft. However, in the long run, I think these might be the agents that, actually get people using and paying more attention to Microsoft co-pilot where they maybe hadn't as much before. So I hope this show was helpful. I hope maybe you got some of your questions answered. But if this was helpful, please consider reposting this on LinkedIn. We always send that to the live stream to our to our LinkedIn account. If you're listening on the podcast, appreciate your support. If you could, subscribe, follow the channel and leave us a rating. And then when you're done, please go to your everyday AI.com, sign up for that free daily newsletter.

And then we'll see back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI. Thanks y'all. Meet Firefly AI assistant. Now live in Adobe Firefly, the Allman One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create in your own words and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome while the assistant accelerates execution. Stand control with the ability to step in and refine at any time. See it today at firefly.adobie.com.

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