Grok Lands Inside Microsoft Word and Excel, While Grok 4.7 Keeps Slipping

In July the xAI story was Grok 4.5, built with Cursor, and the reshuffle that folded xAI into SpaceX. This month the interesting news is not a new model at all. It is where Grok is showing up: inside the Microsoft Office apps that most Malaysian businesses already pay for. Let me explain what Microsoft actually announced, why the missing Grok 4.7 matters less than the headlines suggest, and what a business owner in Kota Kinabalu should do about any of it.

Grok is now an option inside Microsoft Copilot

On 12 September 2026 Microsoft announced that Grok models from SpaceXAI are being added to Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Satya Nadella marked it on X with a short line: 'More model choice coming to Copilot. Welcome Grok!' Access rolls out through the Microsoft Frontier Program, starting with a focused release so Microsoft can gather feedback before widening it.

The details are what matter for a business. Grok is disabled by default. An IT administrator has to switch it on through a dedicated setting, and Microsoft says admins keep transparency and control over which data is processed by xAI's models. The preview is not available to customers in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association or the United Kingdom. And the models are hosted on xAI's infrastructure, not Microsoft's, which is exactly why the admin control exists.

This continues a pattern. Microsoft has been steadily adding models beyond OpenAI's to Copilot, including Anthropic's Claude, and now Grok. For customers it means Copilot is becoming a place where you pick the model for the job rather than a single AI. For Microsoft it reduces dependence on any one supplier.

Grok 4.7: still cooking

The model everyone was waiting for has not arrived. Elon Musk first said Grok 4.7 was about four weeks away in late July, repeated a similar timeline in August, said in early September it would be out in ten days, and on 11 September said it needed a few more days to cook. As of the time of writing there is no release date, no published pricing and no official documentation. xAI's previous two releases also slipped, so this is not unusual for the company, but it is a useful reminder: a model announced on social media is not a model you can plan around.

Grok Bot: the agent xAI actually wants you to try

Where xAI is shipping is Grok Bot, its persistent agent. The idea is that you give a named bot a job, it keeps working in its own environment with a browser, files and routines while you are offline, and it can coordinate with other bots. In the second week of September xAI added sales connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot and Gong, with templates built by its own sales team. From 15 to 17 September it is running Grok Bot Galaxy, a three-day event in San Francisco with a free global livestream, where each day targets a different role: engineering and founders on day one, sales and support on day two, marketing and post-sales on day three.

This is the same direction every lab is heading. Google has Spark, Anthropic has Cowork, OpenAI has agents in ChatGPT, and xAI has Grok Bot. The pitch is identical: stop asking the AI questions and start assigning it work. The difference is in reliability, data handling and how much cleanup you do afterwards, and those only show up when you test on your own tasks.

Why this matters for Sabah businesses

• If you use Microsoft 365, Grok will eventually appear as an option in your Copilot. It is off by default, so nothing changes until someone switches it on. Before that happens, ask a simple question: which of our documents would be sent to xAI's servers, and are we comfortable with that under PDPA?
• Model choice is becoming normal. The days of one AI per company are ending. A reasonable setup for a small Malaysian business is one or two primary tools your team is trained on, plus the flexibility to try another model when a specific task calls for it.
• Do not schedule around promises. Grok 4.7 may be excellent when it lands. Until it does, base your plans on tools that are shipped, documented and priced.
• Agents are worth a small experiment. Whether it is Grok Bot, Claude Cowork or ChatGPT agents, pick one recurring task, give it clear instructions, and measure the time saved over a month. That is far more useful than reading launch coverage.

The practical takeaway

The lesson from xAI this month is not about xAI. It is that the AI you use is increasingly chosen inside the software you already own, by settings your IT person controls, with data flowing to companies you did not sign a contract with. That is manageable, but only if someone in your business understands the tools well enough to make the call.

That is what we build at NextGen Training Academy. Our hands-on, HRDC-claimable AI workshops in Sabah teach your team how to evaluate, choose and safely use AI tools on real work, so when a new option appears in your Office apps, you know exactly what to do with it.