Introducing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

The new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot are dedicated agents that help users create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations—directly in chat. Built on Microsoft’s deep expertise in productivity, these agents use the latest reasoning models to deliver structured, high-quality outputs.

Bridging Chat-First and App-First Experiences with Copilot  

With dedicated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, users can now start projects in Copilot Chat—using natural language prompts to quickly generate documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. These agents don’t just create; they guide users with clarifying questions, helping shape outputs that match specific goals and use cases. This chat-first approach makes it easy to get started, whether you’re drafting a strategic plan, analyzing data, or building a presentation.  

Once the initial draft is ready, Copilot makes it seamless to move into Word, Excel, or PowerPoint for deeper editing and customization. Inside each app, Copilot continues to assist, help refine content, apply formatting, and it’s easy to continue collaborating with others. Agent Mode in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint extends Copilot’s capabilities within each application, enabling you to make direct edits and changes with powerful, app-specific features—unlocking new Copilot interactivity and action that just weren’t possible before. Notably, Agent Mode in PowerPoint is new to Frontier, bringing enhanced creation and editing capabilities to presentations for the first time.  

This integrated flow—from chat-first creation to app-first refinement—means users get the best of both worlds: rapid ideation and easy editing, all powered by Copilot. 

Designing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents 

Just as we’ve seen the emergence of coding agents in Software Engineering, our goal was to extend that paradigm to Office, so that our Agents can orchestrate time consuming, complex tasks on behalf of the user to generate meaningful, high-fidelity Office artifacts. To that end, a key bet we took was on an agentic harness, which allowed us to model these complex tasks at scale, leveraging the power of various underlying AI models. This approach allows for these Agents to use the same Word, Excel and PowerPoint skills used in Agent Mode in the apps, to generate rich and complex documents, workbooks, and presentations now within Copilot Chat. AI based code-optimized reasoning allows the agents to plan, validate, and refine through multiple stages, producing results that are both robust and reliable. Combined with the Office product architecture and Microsoft’s enterprise-grade infrastructure and graph, this approach represents a new milestone in AI-driven co-creation. 

Early results are promising. By applying our standard evaluation processes and quality metrics, we observe that output quality and relevance are comparable to other agentic systems. And this is only the beginning - there’s much more to come as we continue to refine, expand, and reimagine how AI and Office work together to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. 

We designed our agentic harness using the skills pattern, a modular framework that enables Word, Excel and PowerPoint Agents to plan, reason, and collaborate across tasks with precision. The key challenge here was to run the agents in isolation with secure and trusted access to M365 services. We built a compliant sandbox and provided it with access to key resources needed for these agents to generate Office documents. While the pattern offers strong agility, building complex agents remains challenging. We used agentic harness hooks and the sub-agent pattern to ensure control, reliability, and modularity. We built a secure, scalable system that runs each agent in an isolated, locked-down container with no direct internet access. All interactions occur through secure APIs and a brokered WebSocket, enabling task execution and data access without exposing sensitive information. 

Instead of generating Office files directly, the agent produces an intermediate representation that is later transformed into fully compatible Office documents. This approach ensures high quality, fidelity, and security while keeping user data protected. Each agent runs within a secure, isolated environment, and all privileged access such as to Microsoft Graph is handled externally through authenticated user permissions. Together, these safeguards and integrations enable advanced AI-driven content creation without compromising performance, security, or reliability. 

Key Differentiators of Our Approach 

Office-native file generation: Our solution’s key advantage is that it uses real Office applications - not approximations - to generate content. By creating documents through headless versions of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint apps themselves, we ensure high-quality, fully compatible files with styles, themes, and formulas that open and co-author seamlessly in Office. Using official endpoints also prevents unsafe elements like macros or external links while also preserving key data protection elements like sensitivity labels, unlike many AI generators that stitch XML files together. Our approach lets Office itself build the final artifact, leveraging decades of engineering for reliability and security. 

Enterprise grounding (via Work IQ) and context: A key differentiator is the ability to ground creation in enterprise data. Integrated within the Copilot ecosystem, our agents securely retrieve organizational information such as notes, emails, or shared documents to enrich outputs with real context. Grounding occurs through Microsoft Graph, with full permission checks and transparent citations, ensuring privacy and control. By leveraging the knowledge across Microsoft 365, our agents deliver more accurate, relevant, and enterprise-grade results than standalone AI solutions. 

Compliant storage in OneDrive: When generated Office files are stored in OneDrive, secure, compliant, and governed management is ensured. Files inherit organizational retention policies and sensitivity labels, benefiting from enterprise-grade encryption, access controls, and audit logging. This approach keeps all data within the Microsoft 365 environment while enabling seamless sharing, co-authoring, and collaboration through familiar Office apps. 

Multi-step, tool-using AI reasoning: Our Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents use a multi-turn reasoning process that mirrors how a human consultant works: planning, researching, drafting, and reviewing rather than producing a one-shot output. This structured approach delivers more accurate and reliable results. Throughout this process, multiple intermediate validation loops run to check reasoning, verify calculations, and refine drafts—ensuring that every output remains consistent, accurate, and trustworthy. For instance, when building an Excel model, the agent can run intermediate calculations to verify logic before generating the final sheet. By combining reasoning, code execution, and contextual recall, the system produces well-structured, factually sound content far beyond simple prompt-based generation. 

Reusing Office’s Agent Mode investments: We built on existing foundations developed alongside Agent Mode in Office apps, reusing shared frameworks and skills. Many capabilities, like intermediate HTML structures, clarifying question logic, and commands like “insert image” mirror those in the in-app Copilot experiences. This reuse ensures consistency, accelerates development, and allows Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents to automatically benefit as headless Office capabilities evolve. 

Looking ahead 

 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot are just the beginning. As more organizations join the Frontier program, we’re committed to expanding capabilities, refining the experience, and listening to your feedback. Expect ongoing improvements—like richer enterprise grounding in Excel, smoother transitions between chat and app, and new ways to collaborate and create.  

Whether you’re drafting a report, analyzing data, or building a presentation, these agents are here to help you move from idea to finished product with less friction and more confidence. Stay tuned for updates as Copilot continues to be a great AI co-creator in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  
 
Join the Frontier program to try Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents today!