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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft announced new agents for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
- They can help to shrink the gap between ideation and production.
- Other Copilot updates include an expanded Voice mode.
In the era of AI chatbots, an increasingly wide variety of once time-consuming tasks can now be reduced to just a prompt or two. Now Microsoft is bringing this ease-of-use feature to three of its most popular platforms.
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As of today, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have their own dedicated agents that can generate content via Copilot Chat, a pay-as-you-go service launched in January that added agentic capabilities to the preexisting free chat experience for Microsoft 365 commercial customers.
How to use them
Announced during Ignite 2025, the new agents – like many of those that have hit the market over the past year – are designed to minimize the gap between ideation and production. “Simply type a prompt, and these agents will ask targeted follow-up questions to tailor the output to a user’s goals in creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations,” Microsoft wrote in the release.
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Powered by Anthropic models, the agents have access to both user and web data, blending personalization with general contextual awareness. They can handle tasks like research, spreadsheet formatting, and presentation layout design, according to Microsoft.
Back in September, Microsoft launched an Agent Mode feature within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new agents also have direct access to these platforms, but they operate solely within Copilot Chat.
Users start by feeding an agent a simple instruction via text prompt. The agent will then generate a preview version of the requested content (a document, spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation), and then the user can iteratively make adjustments through the chat feature, or simply by switching over to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
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The new agents are currently only accessible via Microsoft’s Frontier early access program to Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed customers. Frontier access to Personal, Family, and Premium subscribers can be expected soon, the company wrote in its announcement.
Other Copilot updates
Microsoft also announced some other notable AI upgrades for Copilot as part of its Ignite 2025 conference:
Agent Mode – an AI-powered capability that gives Copilot more autonomy to handle complex coding and design tasks, and which was previously launched only for Word and Excel – is now also available for PowerPoint.
Copilot for Outlook is also getting some agentic upgrades. An experimental new “interactive voice” feature, for example, automatically summarizes unread emails and offers follow-up suggestions in an AI voice, similar to ChatGPT’s Voice Mode.
On that note, Copilot Voice is now available for all commercial users.
Any users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can now schedule work meetings through a simple chat prompt. Copilot will “find available times, book rooms, draft agendas, and send invites, all through chat,” the company wrote.
The “Create” offering within Copilot, which allows users to create AI-generated content with text prompts, has been integrated with OpenAI’s Sora 2 video-generating model. The integration is now available through the Frontier early access program to commercial users.
Copilot-ification
Microsoft has been leaning heavily into Copilot in recent years to compete with popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
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Part of that effort, as illustrated by the new agents, has been connecting the company’s entire ecosystem of proprietary apps, making it easier for paid subscribers to interact with their Microsoft accounts through a single chat interface – by, say, asking Copilot to summarize recent updates pulled from their Outlook accounts or transfer information directly from a spreadsheet into a PowerPoint presentation.
The company has also been working to broaden the reach of its AI assistant by integrating it with a number of other popular third-party tools, including Claude and Google Drive.
