Microsoft adds Anthropic AI to Copilot for Word and PowerPoint generation

Microsoft recently expanded its generative AI capabilities within the Microsoft 365 Copilot suite, adding Anthropic’s advanced AI models to power a new feature: the Office Agent in Copilot chat.

The integration centres on Anthropic’s high-performance models, Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1. The Office Agent feature enables a “chat-first” workflow, recognising that many work tasks begin in messaging interfaces.

Users can now direct Copilot chat to generate a well-structured PowerPoint deck or a comprehensive Word document from a single, high-level instruction.

For instance, instead of creating a presentation from scratch, a user can prompt the Office Agent with a request like, “ Create a deck summarising the top five trends in the athleisure clothing market.” The agent then analyses the prompt, conducts necessary research, and generates a fully formatted presentation, complete with slide previews.

Here, the goal is to produce ready-to-use documents and presentations more reliably and quickly, addressing previous difficulties some AI tools had in generating effective slides.

The Office Agent resides within the general Copilot chat, distinct from the new Agent Mode rolling out within individual Office applications like Word and Excel. While Agent Mode is currently powered by OpenAI’s latest reasoning models to handle iterative, multi-step tasks inside the applications, such as generating, checking, and refining complex spreadsheets, the agent leverages Anthropic’s models to deliver complete documents from a chat window.

Microsoft offers its enterprise customers a greater choice, allowing them to select the AI model best suited for a specific task. The Anthropic models, Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1, were initially introduced as options for the M365 Copilot Researcher Agent and for creating custom AI agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

The new Office Agent is currently available to users in the Frontier program for licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. Organisations must enable access to the Anthropic models through the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, a step that requires acknowledgement that the Anthropic models operate outside of Microsoft’s managed environment and follow Anthropic’s own terms and conditions.