AI that understands your business and your people
We are excited to announce the general availability of People Skills, a powerful new data layer in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 and the Viva portfolio of apps and services. People Skills is the evolution of the service previously known as Skills in Viva.
Built on this new data layer, we’re also introducing the new Skills agent that helps leaders create dynamic skill-based teams to tackle any project, and lets employees find and connect with people with the skills they need.
People Skills enables Copilot and the Skills agent to understand the backbone of your company – your people. This innovative new grounding source augments the critical work context already built into Copilot to produce the first generative AI experience to deeply understand both your business and your people.
The People Skills data layer will start general availability rollout to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Viva customers at Microsoft Build in May 2025.
The Skills agent will become available starting in June 2025.
Overview
People Skills infers individuals’ skillsets derived from user profile and activity mapped to a customizable built-in skill taxonomy. This data layer fuels the Skills agent, and enhances Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365, and Viva services with contextualized information about the people in your organization.
With this advanced AI-based skills inferencing methodology built into everyday work tools, paired with robust privacy and visibility controls for both admins and end users, People Skills can equip leaders with critical workforce skill insights to prepare and accelerate their AI transformation while empowering employees with personalized skill profiles and career growth tools.
Skills agent
The new Skills agent helps leaders and employees across the organization stay informed, agile, and ready to thrive.
Employees can use the agent to easily explore their own skills and how to develop them, see how they can best leverage Copilot, find experts in the organization, and understand colleague’s skillsets.
Leaders can use the Skills agent to inform strategic workforce planning decisions, such as staffing for high-priority projects, with an up-to-date view of talent landscape strengths, gaps, and opportunities.
People Skills for leaders and organizations
To empower business leaders and analysts with detailed skills-based organizational insights, we’re introducing the new Skills landscape report in Copilot Analytics. This report can be filtered by organizational data - such as HR attributes – to allow leaders and analysts to customize views for relevant groups. The Skills landscape report data can also be exported for custom analysis.
The Skills landscape report will be available in Viva Insights starting in June 2025 and include four report pages detailed below.
The Skills introduction page explains how skill inferences are generated, allows for customization of report parameters, and displays a snapshot of organization progress towards confirmed skills on individual profiles.
The Top skills page shows commonly used skills and identifies areas of skill specialization in your organization.
The Deep dive page allows you to deep dive into a specific skill – including subskills and adjacent skills – to get a more complete view of talent in a specific area.
This Deep dive page also delivers insights focused on the number of people using selected skills by group, trending growth over time, and a heatmapped view of skill concentration across teams.
The Skills hierarchy page allows you to view the connection between skills and explore how your company’s skill taxonomy is structured. This view further allows you to drill down into granular skills that are critically important to your business.
People Skills for employees
People Skills improves the employee experience by improving expertise discovery, showcasing hard-earned talents, and accelerating career growth. As a core principle of People Skills, every person will have the ability to edit, update, customize – and if desired – opt out of sharing their skills or having their skills inferred.
People Skills enables multiple employee scenarios across a variety of apps and services, including: Microsoft 365 Copilot, Skills agent, Microsoft 365 profile card, Microsoft 365 profile editor, Org Explorer, People companion, and Viva Learning.
Watch the video below to see how People Skills creates a rich, connected experience in the flow of work across these endpoints.
Inference engine
The People Skills inference engine uses Microsoft 365 profile and activity signals from the Microsoft Graph like documents, emails, chats, and meetings to create personalized skill profiles for individuals within your organization.
Under the hood, the inference engine is powered by the latest OpenAI LLM models, with a proprietary inferencing approach based on principles of game theory and multi-agent frameworks executing multi-directional inference runs across relevant Microsoft Graph data. This skill extraction ecosystem leverages simulated agent personas that operate on bespoke logic to capture the right signals, optimize for a diverse and specific pool of skills, and improve predictability between input signals and output skills. Combined with the richness of underlying Microsoft Graph data, this proprietary approach produces accurate skill profiles for each user.
In addition to generating accurate skill profiles, the People Skills inference engine:
- Has a frequent refresh cadence so inferences are always up-to-date and relevant
- Requires zero action by end users (note that users always have control over their skills inferences, profile display, and visibility settings)
- Takes <5 minutes to set up from Microsoft 365 admin center when using our recommended configuration
- Includes robust privacy and visibility controls at both the admin and user level
By building a skills inference engine that is accurate, up to date, easy to set up, requires zero end-user action, and is embedded into everyday work tools – we believe we may have solved the core issues traditionally preventing companies from accessing relevant skills information.
Flexible taxonomy approach
People Skills includes a flexible approach to skills taxonomy management, designed to meet you at any stage along your journey to a skills-enabled organization.
Option 1 – Use the built-in skills taxonomy
People Skills includes a built-in skills taxonomy of 16,000+ skills produced in partnership with LinkedIn. Each of the 16,000+ skills in this taxonomy are surrounded by a semantic description of embedded data including skill name, skill description, related skills, where the skill fits in a skill hierarchy, roles that tend to have this skill, and more contextual information on how the skill gets applied at work. This information helps the People Skills inference model determine when the skill is demonstrated.
You can use this taxonomy out of the box, or customize as needed, with admin editing capabilities supporting both removal and addition of skills.
Option 2 – Use your own custom skill taxonomy
You may choose not to use the built-in skills taxonomy, and instead import your own custom skill taxonomy.
Privacy and visibility controls
We take responsible AI and privacy seriously to help you deploy with trust. People Skills includes robust privacy and visibility controls both at the admin and user level. Admins can set these controls for users, groups, or for their entire tenant to meet their needs.
As noted below, users are always in control of their Microsoft 365 profile and may turn skills inferencing and/or skills visibility off at any time.
Skills inferencing controls:
- Admins can turn skills inferencing auto-on (individual users can opt out)
- Admins can turn skills inferencing auto-off (individual users can opt in)
- Admins can disable skills inferencing for their tenant
Skills visibility controls - this refers to the ability for users to see their colleagues’ skills on surfaces like the people card or in Copilot:
- Admins can turn skills visibility auto-on (individual users can opt out)
- Admins can turn skills visibility auto-off (individual users can opt in)
- Admins can disable skills visibility for their tenant
People Skills also provides a framework for tagging sensitive skills that admins do not want the inference engine to capture.
Customer feedback
People Skills has already been enabled for over 100,000 Microsoft employees and 10 customers participating in our private preview. We thank our preview customers for all the deep dives, feedback, and iteration as we fine-tuned our inference engine. In their words:
“We’ve partnered with Microsoft to help our people gain the skills they need for the future. As we undertake one of the largest transformations in UK financial services, gaining deeper skills insights will be instrumental in unlocking the potential of our colleagues and equipping them with the capabilities they need now and in the future. Making the process for colleagues to record their skills simple and efficient has been a priority, enabling them to focus on the skills they want to develop to better serve our customers. The AI-powered suggestions within People Skills are thoughtfully aligned with the work our colleagues do, helping us accelerate progress in our transformation journey”.
- Sharon Doherty, Chief People & Places Officer, Lloyds Banking Group
"The future of work is increasingly about skills. People Skills empowers employees to connect, grow, and thrive by making it easy to build comprehensive skill profiles and evolve dynamically. This shift allows Microsoft to make informed, data-driven decisions that fuel our AI transformation and invest in employee experiences every step of the way."
- Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Chief Diversity Officer and Corporate Vice President of Talent and Learning, Microsoft
"Participating in the People Skills preview with Microsoft has been exciting. It holds great promise in delivering on the power that skills data holds, leveraging the potential of AI-driven skills development. I'm particularly looking forward to the seamless integration of skills-based learning recommendations through Viva Learning, which promises to enhance our growth and efficiency. This initiative is set to continue and strengthen our culture of continuous learning and skill optimization, aligning perfectly with our values of Partnership and being Relentlessly Ambitious”
- Marcus Haure, Lead Product Owner, Grundfos
"People Skills empowers our leaders to make skills data-driven decisions that will fuel our AI transformation. By providing a clear view of our organizational skills, we can strategically plan for the future and ensure our leaders are equipped to drive success."
- Leah Colson, GM, Global Talent Management, Microsoft
Third party integrations
People Skills will include the following third party (3P) integration capabilities at general availability:
- Import 3P skills taxonomies (see “Flexible taxonomy approach” section above)
- Import user skills profiles via Organizational Data in Microsoft 365
- Export user confirmed skills profiles via the Profile API
The intent behind these integrations is to align People Skills, and individual skills profiles, with other skill systems you may already be using. We will continue to enhance our 3P integration capabilities over time.
Licensing
People Skills does not require a separate license - it is simply included in your Microsoft 365 Copilot and/or Viva* licenses. Each person in your company who has either an assigned Microsoft 365 Copilot or Viva license will be eligible for coverage by the People Skills inference engine.
Users covered with base Microsoft 365 licenses will also get access to an improved skills experience, with the ability to search skills from your taxonomy and manually add them via the Microsoft 365 Profile editor.
For questions regarding licensing or access, please contact your Microsoft representative.
*Note that Skills inferencing is not included in the Viva C&C (Communications and Communities) offer.
Getting started
To start preparing for People Skills general availability in May 2025, you can perform the following actions today:
- Share information about People Skills within your organization and verify if any privacy or compliance approvals are required. Our product adheres to Microsoft's Responsible AI guidelines, and we will provide access controls using Feature Access Management to ensure you can deploy confidently while complying with user privacy and local regulations.
- Review the scenarios and set up Microsoft 365 Copilot or Viva. Once generally available, skills data will be available in all applicable surfaces. We recommend assigning licenses and setting up these services in advance so you are ready to use them with skills data.
Additional documentation and deployment guides will be available in May.
Looking Ahead
As we continue to innovate and expand the capabilities of People Skills, our vision is to continue assisting with your AI transformation and personalized skill development. Future updates will focus on refining AI inferencing methodologies, deepening our Copilot + Skills agent use cases, and building transformation capabilities based on understanding how AI impacts workplace skills and tasks.
Stay tuned for more exciting features and improvements as we journey towards empowering organizations with the tools they need to thrive in an AI-driven world.
Join us at the Microsoft 365 Conference (May 6-8) in Las Vegas, or the Microsoft Build event (May 19-22) in Seattle to see live demos and ask our product experts questions.
We look forward to bringing People Skills to your Copilot, Microsoft 365, and Viva experiences soon!
