Frequently Asked Questions about Office Agent

What is Office Agent?

Office Agent is a generalist AI assistant designed to help users accomplish real-world tasks through natural conversation. It supports productivity features such as generating PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents. Users interact with Office Agent by typing prompts, and the assistant responds with generated content or actions. Office Agent is in preview phase.

What can Office Agent do?

Office Agent uses AI models to understand natural language and generate content. It can:

• Create and refine documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Summarize or simplify content
• Analyze data and generate charts
• Answer questions and assist with research
• Retrieve public web content when asked for current information

What are Office Agent’s intended uses?

Office Agent is intended for general productivity and consumer use, including:

• Drafting and editing documents
• Supporting personal and professional tasks
• Assisting with data analysis and visualization

How was Office Agent evaluated? What metrics are used to measure performance?

At Microsoft, we're guided by our AI principles, our Responsible AI Standard, and decades of research on AI, grounding, and privacy-preserving machine learning. A multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and policy experts reviews our AI systems for potential harms and mitigations—filtering to limit harmful content, query- and result-blocking sensitive topics. We make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, and prompting users to review, fact-check, and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise.

What are the limitations of Office Agent? How can users minimize their impact?

Known limitations include:

• Occasional hallucinations or incorrect outputs
• Limited understanding of contextual nuance
• In the preview phase, Office Agent is only offered in the English language for Microsoft accounts based in the United States.

To minimize impact:

• Be specific in your prompts
• Review and edit content as it is generated
• Avoid inputting sensitive data

What operational factors and settings allow for effective and responsible use of Office Agent?

Office Agent performs best when:

• Prompts include topic, tone, audience, and format
• Users operate in a connected environment (internet required)
• Accessibility tools are used for inclusive content. User choices like file format, tone, and audience impact the output. Generated content should be treated like any draft - reviewed, stored, and shared responsibly.

What languages are supported?

Office Agent currently supports the following languages:

• English
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Simplified Chinese
• Japanese

How do I provide feedback on Office Agent?

You can provide feedback directly through the Office Agent interface or via support channels listed on stride.microsoft.com. Feedback helps improve the system and ensures alignment with Responsible AI practices.