Microsoft recently announced its new office concept — "Vibe Working" (Atmosphere Working), aiming to completely revolutionize the way users work in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint through a more conversational, AI-driven approach. This concept draws inspiration from "atmosphere coding" in the software development field, marking Microsoft's move to upgrade AI assistants from simple tools into autonomous collaborative "work partners."

The core of "Vibe Working" is two new features: Agent Mode and Office Agent. These features are based on the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, designed to automate tasks and simplify complex workflows.

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Agent Mode: Autonomous Evolution of Excel and Word

Agent Mode is now integrated into Excel and Word, with support for PowerPoint coming soon. In Excel, this mode uses a complex **"planning-executing-checking"** loop, capable of autonomously analyzing data, building financial models, generating charts, and reviewing results. Notably, it can run lightweight tests before each operation to detect errors hidden in seemingly correct formulas.

Although Agent Mode achieved an accuracy rate of 57.2% in 912 tasks on the SpreadsheetBench benchmark, which is still below the human level of 71.3%, it has significantly outperformed other AI systems such as Shortcut.ai and ChatGPT Agent. Microsoft emphasized that all calculation processes are transparent to users, who can track and verify every step at any time.

In Word, Agent Mode supports **"Vibe Writing,"** allowing users to draft, refine, and query document content through more interactive conversations, even aggregating information from external sources like emails.

Office Agent: A Versatile System for Copilot

Powered by Anthropic's Claude model, the Office Agent runs as an independent multi-agent system within Copilot chats. It consists of multiple specialized agents responsible for different tasks such as coding, finance, and research. This enables the Office Agent to create complete PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from scratch. It can independently perform web searches, analyze sources, and organize outputs, even automatically generating visually appealing visuals and charts that align with the document's theme, surpassing traditional static templates.

Additionally, the Office Agent adopts a unique concept called **"Test-Driven Development" (TDD),"** using reusable "style blueprints" to ensure consistency in content and design, rather than simply generating code that could lead to chaos.

Availability and Prospects

Currently, these new features are available through the Frontier program to Microsoft 365 Copilot and personal/family subscription users. The Agent Mode in Excel is already available on the web, and the Office Agent is also available to users in the United States. Microsoft stated that it plans to expand "Vibe Working" to more Copilot features in the future, but no specific timeline has been announced yet.

However, the popularity of "Vibe Working" also comes with potential risks. While some believe it can significantly boost productivity, some developers have warned that AI-driven workflows may introduce subtle errors, posing new challenges for users.