How AI is changing the office
Agent Mode comes to Office apps today
How AI data centers send your power bill soaring
Does this sound familiar?
- You start your day with 100+ unread emails.
- Your socials haven’t been touched in weeks.
- That blog post is still just a headline.
- Everything keeps getting pushed to “next week.”
=> You’re wearing too many hats: CEO, marketer, salesperson, accountant, and customer service all in one...
Meet Marblism: Your AI Employee Dream Team.
Marblism gives you a ready-to-work AI team:
- Eva, Executive Assistant
“I handle your inbox, calendar and craft emails in your tone — so you look productive, even if you hit snooze three times.”
- Penny – Blog Writer
“I write SEO-optimized blogs that make Google happy, your readers obsessed, and your competition nervous.”
- Sonny – Social Media Manager
“I turn your social media into a lead-generating machine, without you having to dance on camera”
- Stan – Sales Outreach
“I find leads, send cold emails, and follow up—turning ‘not interested’ into ‘where do I sign?’”
- Rachel - AI Receptionist
“I’ll answer calls while you hide in the back pretending to be busy.
Get an AI Team who run your inbox, socials, SEO, lead generation, calls, and support
***
How AI is changing the office
AI’s full impact will become clear only over a long period of time. And the office is already a different place because of the technology. The evidence for that is partly quantitative. Employees are often adopting the technology unilaterally, working out for themselves how best to use it. Some are doing so surreptitiously, uncertain whether they will get credit or replaced. But the firms behind the frontier models can see what’s happening:
In a new NBER study, a team of researchers from OpenAI, with David Deming of Harvard University, document how people use ChatGPT. Although personal use of OpenAI’s chatbot has grown even faster, the daily average number of work messages zoomed from 213m in June 2024 to 716m a year later. The latest version of the Anthropic Economic Index, a piece of analysis by researchers at the firm behind Claude, distinguishes between “automation” and “augmentation” modes—one being a more directive interaction in which a user tells the model to do something, the other a more collaborative pattern of questions and feedback. For the first time in the index’s short life, instances of automation outstripped those of augmentation, suggesting that ever more tasks are being delegated to AI.
The assumption that AI is everywhere is slowly taking hold. Meetings are routinely transcribed and summarized by a machine. You are no longer having a discussion with colleagues; you are part of the historical record. Usage of AI may well be part of how your performance is assessed. Some firms have dashboards to monitor employees’ adoption of the technology. Most bosses will have sent out the message that they expect staff to experiment with it.
Writing-related requests are the most common use of ChatGPT at work, according to the new study. That may well mean you are encountering fewer grammatical errors and more factual ones. You are also more likely to be reading, or indeed producing, generic content. Sterile language has long been part of workplaces: think airline-safety demos or call-center messages insisting that “your business matters to us” (even if your time patently doesn’t). All correspondence is now lightly chlorinated. AI is leaving its mark on workplace behavior, language and assumptions….
***
Agent Mode comes to Office apps today
Microsoft is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. Agent Mode in Excel and Word is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience that Microsoft has added to its Office apps. It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts. “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
Agent Mode essentially takes a complex task and breaks it down with planning and reasoning that you can follow. It then uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to break down each step of document creation into an agentic task and execute it. It’s like watching an automated macro in real time, showing everything it’s doing in the sidebar. Microsoft has taken a gradual approach to adding AI elements to Excel, particularly because the data it handles powers some of the most important parts of businesses worldwide. “[Agent Mode] lets you build sheets that are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable,” Chauhan says. “We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight.” It lets Copilot draft content, suggest refinements, and clarify what elements are needed during the process of document creation. You can do things like create a monthly report with data from previous months and have Copilot summarize the highlights for the month and the differences from a previous report. “Copilot makes suggestions to keep the process flowing, so writing feels more like a dialogue than a task,” Chauhan says.
Office Agent can create fully structured PowerPoint decks, all while doing web-based research and providing a live preview of slides. Microsoft is hoping that it will help Office continue to differentiate itself from the magnitude of AI tools that are also trying to create documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks.
While OpenAI models continue to power Microsoft’s AI work inside Office apps, it certainly feels like Anthropic’s models are inching closer to being a key part of Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Agent Mode in Copilot for Excel and Word will both be available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal / Family subscribers. Agent Model in Excel and Word is only available in the web versions at launch, with desktop support coming soon. Office Agent is also available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal / Family subscribers in the US….
***
How AI data centers send your power bill soaring
Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers. It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy.
Tech companies, now among the biggest and most powerful forces in the world, have staked their future on AI. Data centers — some with a footprint large enough to cover much of Manhattan — are chock full of racks of servers delivering computer power and storage needed to train and run AI models. In the US, power demand from data centers is set to double by 2035, to almost 9% of all demand, according to BNEF. Some predict it will be the biggest surge in US energy demand since air conditioning caught on in the 1960s.
PJM Interconnection, the operator of the largest US electric grid, has faced significant strain from the AI boom. The rapid development of data centers relying on the system raised costs for consumers from Illinois to Washington, DC, by more than $9.3 billion for the 12 months starting in June, according to the grid’s independent market monitor. Costs will go up even more next year.
For local officials, the effects are becoming urgent. Last week, Pennsylvania’s Governor convened the first-ever meeting of representatives from all 13 states served by PJM. He warned that if PJM didn’t tackle changes to reign in consumer costs, Pennsylvania could withdraw from the system. New Jersey regulators are studying this and Maryland may do the same, underscoring growing discontent among the three original states that made up the P, J and M grid. “The PJM capacity market will be at its maximum price for the foreseeable future, it could be five or 10 years,” said Joe Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, the grid’s official watchdog. He said data centers need to bring their own generation, and those projects should get a speedy approval process….
Cheers, SBalley Team!