Are Microsoft’s core productivity apps — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — endangered by the rise of AI? That question has gained urgency as Microsoft stock plunges and analysts question whether the traditional Office suite will remain relevant. “Whether Microsoft Word or Excel will be rendered obsolete by AI remains to be seen,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment strategist at Cresset Wealth Advisors, according to Bloomberg. “We don’t know what the environment is going to look like in a few years, which opens up very real questions like, will we even use a Microsoft suite anymore?” added Keith Fitz-Gerald, principal at the Fitz-Gerald Group.

Microsoft’s productivity apps have historically helped users organize, format, and massage ideas into actionable results. With the introduction of Copilot, Microsoft aims to let Word, PowerPoint, and Excel actually generate those results. However, external AI applications like ChatGPT and Claude already offer similar document formatting, content creation, and synthesis capabilities—often without requiring a Microsoft subscription. This raises the prospect that millions of users could abandon the Office suite entirely.

Consider Word’s menu options: Most relate to formatting and layout. Yet you can now ask ChatGPT to format your straight-text notes into beautiful documents. Word is becoming little more than a scratchpad with a ubiquitous file format. AI chatbots also excel in content synthesis, putting PowerPoint at risk. Microsoft touts Copilot’s ability to ingest multiple documents and create a PowerPoint from them, but other AI applications do the same thing—and many organizations already lean on Claude and its competitors for that task.

Even Excel is not immune. One of Excel’s core strengths is the vast connective tissue of linked spreadsheets—adjust a value and changes ripple across shared documents. But what users increasingly want is deeper analysis of trends and actionable insights. Connecting these dots is a strength of AI, and that AI does not have to be authored by Microsoft. Copilot itself has not done Microsoft any favors. User complaints and apathy are rampant; a quick survey of our office reveals no one uses Copilot—and we are PCWorld. Feature creep has given Word, PowerPoint, and Excel extremely heavy, often indecipherable interfaces, while large language models (LLMs) are essentially single-field chatbots.

Microsoft’s 365 Family plan costs $12.99 per month. Anthropic’s Claude Pro Plan costs $20 per month—$7 more, but with a general LLM you can do far more, and the momentum is on AI’s side. The question is not just whether users will switch, but whether Microsoft can adapt fast enough. The company has a history of responding to disruption: it survived the rise of the internet, open-source software, and mobile computing. But each time, it required a fundamental shift in strategy.

Historically, Microsoft Office became the dominant productivity suite through bundling, enterprise agreements, and a deep ecosystem of macros, templates, and third-party add-ins. The familiar ribbon interface, first introduced in Office 2007, was a major overhaul designed to simplify access to features. Yet over subsequent versions, feature creep added hundreds of esoteric options, making the interface bloated. Meanwhile, AI tools offer a radically simpler interaction: conversational prompts that generate formatted output instantly.

The shift toward AI-powered workflows is not just about convenience; it represents a change in how people think about productivity. Instead of manually applying formatting or constructing formulas, users can describe what they want and let the AI handle execution. This reduces the need for deep knowledge of the application’s feature set. For many routine tasks, the chatbot is sufficient.

However, Microsoft still holds advantages. Enterprise customers rely on Active Directory, SharePoint integration, and compliance features that AI chatbots cannot easily replace. Office files remain the de facto standard in business communication, and the network effect of shared documents is powerful. Moreover, Microsoft is investing heavily in its own AI infrastructure, including deep integration of Copilot across its cloud services. The company recently announced Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and AI-powered agents in Outlook.

Yet the timeline for disruption is uncertain. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of large enterprises will use AI-powered content generation for internal documentation, but adoption for complex spreadsheet modeling or presentation design may lag. The key battleground is user behavior: if younger generations grow up with AI chatbots as their primary tools, the need for dedicated office applications diminishes.

In productivity news, beware unexpected end-of-support for Office apps bought from the Microsoft Store. Intel’s budget Wildcat Lake platform (Core Series 3) underperforms, while Qualcomm offers better alternatives. PDF Editify is an average but affordable PDF editor. Windows Central reports the Surface Go and Surface Laptop Go are discontinued, and AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 series fails to impress in battery life. Our tip on optimizing RAM usage in Windows feels reminiscent of the days of HIMEM.SYS.

Determining your most productive time of day and scheduling tasks accordingly can boost efficiency. For most people, that means accepting a post-lunch crash and planning quick tasks in the morning, with lengthier work in the afternoon.

Thanks for reading this edition of Smart Mode, PCWorld’s newsletter devoted to helping you make the most of your life, smartly.

Source: PCWorld News