#agent-mode

#agent-mode

Agent Mode enables users to create persistent agents that can operate in the background to manage ongoing tasks. Instead of responding only to immediate prompts, Copilot can now monitor, summarize, or take actions over time. For example, a user can instruct Copilot to track updates to a shared document, prepare a meeting recap, or notify a team when project milestones are reached.

Driven by OpenAI's GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel, and it allows the creation of complex documents and spreadsheets from user prompts. It's called "agent" mode because it doesn't just work from the prompt in a single step; rather, it plans multi-step work and runs a validation loop in the hopes of ensuring quality. It's only available in the web versions of Word and Excel at present, but the plan is to bring it to native desktop applications later.

Another example is a loan calculator that figures out monthly payments based on user inputs (e.g., load amount, interest rate, loan term) and then generates a payment schedule in a formatted table. Or a monthly financial analysis for a small business with a breakdown of product lines.