Weekly Update 13 October 2025 – Agents with Paolo, Vibe Working in 365, Building a Second Brain

This week:

Copilot Agents, No-Code to Pro-Code Options – Paolo Pialorsi, Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft

Vibe working: Introducing Agent Mode and Office Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

You can also listen to the audio-only version of this episode: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 13 October 2025.

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Transcript (AI-Generated)

Hello. Welcome to another weekly update. I hope you’re doing well.

This week has been a bit quieter. Maybe that’s typical for this time of year, a short dip between post-summer activity and the anticipation around Microsoft Ignite just a month away. I haven’t done a deep comparative analysis, but it feels like product announcements and enhancements have slowed across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

The pace of innovation around Copilot—especially extensibility—has also seemingly tapered off. That’s not a bad thing; it could be that internal teams are regrouping after an intense period of work. Everyone needs that moment of reset before the next big sprint.

Developer Talk with Paolo Pialorsi

A few weeks ago, I did a developer-focused interview with Paolo Pialorsi, a senior developer architect at Microsoft and former MVP. It’s now live on Empowering.Cloud and free to watch. It’s about 30 minutes of us discussing extensibility options in Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

We cover topics like:

• What agents are in this context
• Choosing between low-code and pro-code options
• Tool selection, licensing, and payment models

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool for extensibility—there’s a growing toolbox and it’s important to make informed decisions.

Agent Mode in Microsoft 365 Copilot

There’s a noteworthy blog post this week introducing “agent mode” in Microsoft 365 Copilot—bringing parallels from GitHub Copilot agent mode and Claude Code into the productivity suite.

As developers, we’re likely already seeing the benefits of agent mode in development. I find it very productive for lower-level tasks after the planning is done. Microsoft seems to be extending this idea to general productivity tasks—helping users go beyond just querying data but actually executing actions through Copilot in apps like Word and Excel.

This is something users have been asking for, but I question if it’s actually ready. Copilot is still maturing in basic use cases, so moving fast into agent mode might be premature.

That said, it’s coming—starting in Excel and Word, with PowerPoint to follow. It’s currently limited to the Frontier Program (a semi-private preview for select customers). There’s no definitive timeline for broader rollout, but my estimate is about a year away from mainstream use.

Read Recommendation – “Building a Second Brain”

In more personal productivity territory, I’ve recently been reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. It’s an excellent guide to structuring digital information: notes, ideas, references, and building a system for recall and creativity.

The core idea is simple but powerful: keeping structured, searchable, and tagged digital notes can compound over time to increase your effectiveness. If the best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago, the next best time is today. The same goes for note-keeping.

I use OneNote, although I’m experimenting with Notion now. The book presents a methodological approach that’s useful regardless of the tool.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for this week—a quieter one overall, but a chance to dive into some deeper conversations and productivity strategies. Have a great week and I’ll speak to you again soon.