Office Upgrade

/3 min read
Microsoft brings AI agents to Word and Excel
Office Upgrade
(Illustrations: Saurabh Singh) 

 Word and Excel, part of the Microsoft Office suite, have been two of its most popular products for users, span­ning students to businesses. So, when it brought agentic AI into them this week, it marked the leapfrogging of a concept to real world utility. Agent Mode could radically improve the user experience. In Excel, for example, if you have a compli­cated spreadsheet, then conversational commands in ordinary language will execute processes that would otherwise need expertise. Like asking it to pull out a slice of data, like a future projection or delayed payments, and make a table or graph out of it. While much better than earlier AI assistance, accuracy in its benchmark tests still trail behind a human being’s. That will change as the technology is refined.