The science behind editing with Copilot in Microsoft Office
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How Excel got agentic: An interview with Microsoft Director of Science Mukul Singh
How Excel got agentic: An interview with Microsoft Director of Science Mukul Singh
We sat down with Microsoft Director of Science Mukul Singh to learn how his team leveraged two years of research to bring agentic capabilities to Excel and beyond.
By
Command Line team
Command Line editorial team
When Mukul Singh made the jump from pure research into product, it was a leap of faith. But he had an idea that he wanted to bring to life: delivering agentic AI capabilities in Excel.
While this was well before buzzwords like “the agentic AI era” had cultural cachet, the research was already headed in that direction. So armed with a prototype and a healthy dose of ambition, Singh made his pitch.
Two years on, he’s fully transitioned from his role in Microsoft Research to a new gig in the Office Product Group and successfully delivered the ability to edit with Copilot in Excel (previously known as Excel Agent Mode). Not ones to rest on their laurels, the team quickly went on to ship agentic capabilities in PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook. It’s changing the way people get work done—and it started with the hypothesis that Excel, at its heart, is a low-resource programming language.
We sat down with Singh to learn more about his journey from research to product, the science and research behind Office’s new agentic capabilities, and why Excel was the perfect testbed for agentic AI.
Command Line
To kick us off, tell us a little about yourself.
Mukul Singh
I’m a researcher in the Office Product Group team. I recently started a science team focusing on agents and AI for the Microsoft Office product portfolio. I was originally in Microsoft Research, working on research full-time, publishing papers, and very far away from the product world. To be honest, it’s been an incredible journey getting to go from research to then being embedded in the product space.
Command Line
How long ago did you make that transition?
Mukul Singh
It was only two years ago—and right at the cusp of when the Excel Agent Mode work started. In fact, that was the catalyst. I had no intention of ever moving out of academia and deep research. And, you know, Microsoft Research is one of the best labs in the industry that’s still connected to academia. So I was pretty okay with my life. I didn’t want anything else. It was the most perfect blend that I could hope for.
And then this project in Excel started, and there were some initial discussions. I thought it sounded interesting, because one of the things in research that you always feel is missing as a gap is that you don’t see your work actually delivering value. You see it deliver a lot of theoretic value—you see its shape and the direction of the world, per se. Other people might take your research direction and extend it in meaningful ways. Research does shape society in a way, but you don’t see any immediately measurable impact.
So at that point, I felt like I wanted to work on something where I could see that happen—where I could watch the impact unfold in front of me.
Command Line
What are some of the research questions that ultimately led to Excel Agent Mode (which we’re now calling edit with Copilot in Excel)?
Mukul Singh
My research in MSR and all of my papers previously had all been about AI for low-resource programming languages. I like to explain low-resource coding languages as languages that are very obscure and make up less than like 0.1% of the entire coding community. So AI models are generally bad at them because they just learn off the internet and known sources.
To give you an example, internally a Microsoft there’s a language called Kusto Query Language (KQL). That’s just used for telemetric querying. Now, it’s a public language—it’s...