Microsoft Expands Copilot with Office Agents

Hi everyone,

Microsoft is adding a new agent mode to Office that makes Excel and Word feel more hands-on, with smarter help built in.

OpenAI just dropped Sora 2, which takes video generation up a notch by putting people, animals, and objects into scenes more realistically.

And over at Google, Sundar Pichai is giving Google Home a major refresh with Gemini. The new app is faster, cleaner, and comes with AI features like daily summaries, smarter alerts, and voice-driven automations.

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Let’s jump in.

In this issue:

• 🤝 In Partnership: Keep your profits intact

• 🤿Deep Dive: Microsoft brings agent mode to Office

• 🖼️AI Art: Examples of great and trending AI art

• 🤝Supported by: The news you need, the way you want it

• 🤿Deep Dive: OpenAI launches Sora 2

• ⚒️Tool Snapshots: Tools for AI, no-code, and productivity

• 🤿Deep Dive: Google Home upgrade

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

Microsoft Introduces Copilot Agent Mode and Office Agent for Office with OpenAI and Anthropic

Intelligence: Microsoft announced Agent Mode for Excel and Word and Office Agent in Copilot chat to bring agentic workflows and higher quality outputs to Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

• Agent Mode runs inside Excel and Word to plan tasks, build outputs, check results, and iterate, while Office Agent works in Copilot chat to create PowerPoint decks and Word documents with a chat-first flow, with PowerPoint support in Agent Mode coming soon.

• Excel Agent Mode can speak Excel to build models, create sheets, choose formulas, validate outcomes, and fix issues, and Word Agent Mode turns drafting into an interactive dialogue with suggestions, clarifications, and native formatting.

• Excel and Word Agent Mode use OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, and Office Agent uses Anthropic models, with Excel Agent Mode scoring 57.2 percent on the SpreadsheetBench tasks evaluated by Microsoft.

• Clarifies intent on length, theme, and audience; conducts web research with live previews, generates content with quality checks; and supports iterative edits before handing off to PowerPoint or Word

• Excel Agent Mode is available in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed customers and Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium on the web via the Excel Labs add-in with desktop coming soon; Word Agent Mode begins rolling out on the web with desktop coming soon; and Office Agent starts rolling out in the United States for Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium in English on the web.

🖼️ AI ART

Examples of great and trending AI art

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

Sam Altman and OpenAI Launch Sora 2 and a Social App

Intelligence: OpenAI announced Sora 2, a video and audio generation model with stronger physics and control, and launched a Sora iOS app featuring cameo tools and user controls focused on well-being and safety.

• OpenAI frames Sora 2 as a GPT 3.5 moment for video with improved world simulation, better adherence to physics like rebounds on missed shots, detailed control across multiple shots, and high-quality audio including speech and sound effects.

• Users can upload a short video and audio to capture their likeness and voice, then appear as cameos inside generated scenes, a capability that extends to people, animals, and objects.

• The Sora iOS app lets users create, remix, and discover videos with a customizable feed, rolling out first in the United States and Canada with invite-only access.

• Sora 2 starts free with generous limits subject to compute. ChatGPT Pro users can try an experimental higher-quality Sora 2 Pro on the web and soon in-app; an API is planned, and Sora 1 Turbo remains available with existing libraries preserved.

• OpenAI says the feed is biased to people you follow, prioritizes content that inspires creation over time spent, offers natural language controls and well-being check-ins, adds teen view limits and stricter cameo permissions, provides parental controls via ChatGPT, expands human moderation, and gives users full control to grant and revoke cameo use and remove any video containing their likeness.

• OpenAI positions Sora 2 as a step toward general-purpose world simulators and future agents, emphasizes mastering large-scale video pretraining and posttraining, and says monetization will be limited to optional paid generations during compute constraints with a commitment to transparent updates.

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Futuristic tools within AI, no-code, and productivity

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• 🎬 CrePal - AI directed filmmaking brings your stories to life. Free option available.

• 💰 Station - Unlock hidden revenue for podcasters and YouTubers. Free to try.

• 💻 Floutwork - Transforming browsers into effortlessly organized workspaces with AI. Free to try.

• 💸 Subscription Day - Track and analyze your paid subscriptions efficiently. Free option available.

🤿 DEEP DIVE

Sundar Pichai and Google Overhaul Google Home With Gemini

Intelligence: Google is rolling out a redesigned Google Home app that centralizes device management, boosts performance, and adds Gemini AI for summarization, search, and automation.

• Google acknowledges past shortcomings and reports 70 percent faster startup, 80 percent fewer crashes, and over 100 updates across a year, with support spanning more than 800 million devices from over 50,000 OEMs.

• Google Home becomes the primary hub for Nest with support for thermostats from 2015 onward, cameras and doorbells with history migration, Nest Protect alerts, and Nest x Yale Locks, plus camera improvements like 30% faster live view, 40% fewer playback failures, and a smoother 6x history frame rate.

• The app now has three tabs - Home, Activity, and Automation, gesture navigation across devices and dashboards, quicker camera interactions, including YouTube-style double-tap seek, and richer animated previews in notifications.

• AI summaries replace generic motion alerts, a Home Brief summarizes daily activity, Ask Home enables natural language search and control, users can create automations by describing them, and Gemini can surface insights like AC runtime or TV usage.

• Google Home Premium is required for some AI features, including Home Brief, Ask Home, and natural language automation creation, starting at 10 dollars per month and included with Google AI Pro and Ultra at no extra charge.

• Google Home 4.0 starts a global rollout on October 1, with Early Access available by opening Google Home, tapping the profile icon, going to Home Settings, and selecting Early Access.

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