On April 23, 2025, Microsoft unveiled a plethora of new features related to Microsoft 365 Copilot, including a redesigned Copilot app, Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Search, and several new Copilot agents. Amidst this extensive list of innovations, it is easy to overlook the profound impact of some of these breakthroughs. In this blog post, we will focus on one key announcement from the 2025 Spring wave that we at Storyals believe will significantly impact organizations - “People Skills”.
In today’s rapidly changing work environment, many companies are prioritizing reskilling and upskilling their workforce to stay competitive. In many ways, the skills of your workforce are the currency for your business's success. Organizations use various methods to identify and utilize employee skills, including manual skill inventories, performance reviews, talent management systems, internal networking, and training programs. However, these approaches can be time-consuming and may not always offer a complete or current picture of employee capabilities. With the introduction of People Skills in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Viva, Microsoft aims to address this challenge by providing organizations with an automated, AI-powered solution to skills management.
Ever since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, Microsoft has come into possession of enormous amounts of skills and learning profile data. This data has formed the foundation for the skills taxonomy on which People Skills is built. You can think of the People Skills taxonomy as a huge library of skills - over 16,000 skills across industries. Each skill has related information such as a description of the skill, related skills and roles that tend to have this specific skill. As your employees work, signals are picked up from their daily work activities via the Microsoft Graph, and mapped to the skills in the People Skills taxonomy. The suggested skills are then associated with the employee, and can, if the employee desires, be displayed with their profile. From an individual user's perspective, this makes it much easier to find people in your organization with the specifc skillset you need. From an organizational perspective, gaining a deeper understanding of skills data aids in identifying skill gaps, and supports strategic planning for training, development initiatives, and recruitment.
To get started using People Skills, you actively need to enable it in the Copilot Control System in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Here, the administrator can choose to leverage Microsoft's built-in People Skills taxonomy out-of-the-box or upload their own as a complement or substitute. There are also multiple controls for allowing users to opt-in or opt-out of this experience. Within 48 hours, employees will see skills suggestions in their profile cards. Users can choose to confirm the suggested skills and make them visible on their profile cards. According to Microsoft, the accuracy rate of the AI-inferred is surprisingly high based on the feedback from the private preview customers that have tested People Skills.
It’s important to note that the skills are not validated; a user can choose to add a skill without having it verified. Also, skills are binary, meaning no proficiency level is built into the People Skills framework (at least not at this time). This means that either a user has a skill, or they don’t.
People Skills will be included for all users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot or a Microsoft Viva Suite license. It will be made generally available at Microsoft Build in May. It’s important to note that not all users in your organization need to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot or Viva Suite license to benefit from People Skills. Users without a valid license will still be able to see other people's skills and manually add skills to their own profile, but skills will not be automatically populated for them, and they will not be able to use the People Skills Agent, or get access to reports.
Even though this is an extremely powerful and comprehensive solution right off the bat, it is, of course, just in its infancy. Microsoft has already announced more capabilities on the roadmap. The “Skills Agent” is an AI-agent focused specifically on skills. It will help users find people with the appropriate skills and also help you assess and build your own skills.
Later this year Microsoft will also introduce “The Skills landscape report” which will be included in Viva Insights. Here, selected leaders will be able to get a better overview of the skills landscape in your organization to identify skills gaps, plan recruiting and resourcing.
It is evident that Microsoft’s strategy is to integrate more functionality into Microsoft 365 Copilot. The value proposition extends beyond individual users' daily productivity to significantly impacting and influencing business operations. As we look ahead, the introduction of features like the Skills Agent and the Skills landscape report in Viva Insights signifies a broader vision. This vision encompasses not just the enhancement of employees' individual skill sets but a fundamental impact on the bottom line. Here, organzations' IT and HR departments must align to ensure this value isn’t untapped.