From CNET: During Microsoft's latest earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Satya Nadella perhaps unintentionally summed up the current state of the company's massive agentic AI push.
"It sort of didn't work until it started working," Nadella said, referencing the Agent Mode feature in Microsoft Excel, "and that's just because the model showed up."
Agent Mode, a feature that uses AI to create and edit Excel workbooks in tandem with your actions, is now the default mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Premium subscribers in Excel, Word and PowerPoint as of last week. He said Microsoft's investments in its AI infrastructure gave the company the usage capacity to implement the model that worked.
(Nadella used the term Agent Mode, but officially, Microsoft has retired that term, preferring the simpler "edit with Copilot.")
That capacity played a big role during the earnings call, as Microsoft shifts toward charging customers for how much they use the AI, not just for access licenses. "We have a structural position in knowledge, work, coding [and] security," he said. "And then you couple that with the right business model… which is user plus usage."
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