My recent brush with the slow-motion car-crash that is #Copilot 365, made me ponder a bit further on the future of MS Office tools and, by extension, #Microsoft itself…
Setting aside the typical botched execution by a large dysfunctional tech corp trying to hop on the AI bandwagon, one of the fundamental reasons why agent integration into an Office suite will always be a shitshow, is that Office formats (doc, xls…) are the *polar* opposites of what works well with LLMs…
Long before LLMs, MS Office formats were already notorious for being a jumbled underdocumented (often proprietary) mess, that barely worked with its own designated app, and had zero interoperability whatsoever.
It took massive community efforts (or large corps like Google) to reverse-engineer enough of it, to provide semi-passable conversion tools.
These formats were explicitly designed *NOT* to be easily modified by external scripts: use MS' own exploit-riddled scripting, or get lost.
Cue 2026:
Mediocre LLMs roam the earth: they'll hallucinate half the answers to the most basic things, but put them in an agentic loop, and they'll do a decent job at replacing your bored intern ("take the values in that spreadsheet, make a formatted document out of it, add a TOC, wrap a bow on top")…
Except that to do that remotely well, they need to go through a layer of deterministic scripting: they aren't replacing the intern, they're replacing the one-use 100 line script you might write…
This works remarkably well if your file format is straightforward (or even when it's not) and/or *extremely* well documented:
An LLM will make wonders out of your CSV and MD files (and then, sure, why not: it will even render your MD to a fairly passable PDF file, maybe even using a LaTeX template…), in a fraction of the time it'd take you.
But ask it to work with .doc and .xls, and watch as it flounders trying to use half-baked Python packages to parse/write these formats… 🤷
Of course, this is not helped by the idiotic corporate approach taken by the Copilot team ("we'll just give it access to the cloud drive and wish it the best")… You might at least try to come up with halfway decent dedicated Office-format tools to edit/read… 🤷
But in any case, what this tells me, is that either of 2 things happen soon:
1. this whole "AI will do your white-collar job" thing dies out…
*or*
2. MS Office goes extinct, replaced by tools that can actually use LLM Agents.
AI isn't intended to be a productivity tool.
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/
https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/
It's designed to burn fossil fuels & keep captive consumers hooked on oil.
This is why Charles Koch, Bill Gates & their ilk are spending a billion dollars to coerce adoption & lobbying so heavily with Trump.
https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/
An accounting LLM that hallucinates financial statements.
https://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/news/2025/10/15/koch-artificial-intelligence-accounting-ai-startup.html
AI & high gas prices
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-use-beat-record-highs-2026-2027-ai-use-surges-eia-says-2026-03-10/
The smart thing to do would be to take one look at this mess and say "we're getting out of legacy MS Office formats. From now on we'll adopt open formats which will be better for scripts and AIs (and increasingly AIs using scripts within skills)"
@interstar You sir have never met a single Microsoft exec, have you… 😆
@Npars01 Oh yea, we all have an accumulated few years of hilarious (and/or depressing) examples of why this whole AI bubble is an omnishamble…
I did find this particular aspect interesting for 2 reasons:
1. it does represent what actual white-collar execs experience as "top of the line AI integration"… and it's abysmal
2. *part* of the reason why it's so abysmal, is that it tries to integrate AI with tools that are fundamentally not AI-friendly (another part, is obv that these LLMs suck)
