Microsoft People Skills
Microsoft People Skills works out what your people can do by reading the work they already do in Microsoft 365, and writes a list of skills onto each person’s profile card for them to confirm. It costs $0 extra, so far, with a Microsoft Copilot or Viva licence.
AI-built skill profiles from the work people do in Microsoft 365, included with Copilot and Viva licences.
Your people work mainly in Microsoft 365, you hold a Copilot or Viva licence, and you want a real answer this week instead of a procurement cycle.
Your work happens in Jira, Salesforce or ServiceNow, your workforce is frontline, or you need the AI’s suggestions in another system, since only skills an employee has confirmed can be exported. Microsoft also says People Skills is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, so do not base either on it. A school, university or public body should check with Microsoft first, because education and government licences are excluded from two of the three Microsoft plans that come with it.
$0 extra, so far. There is no separate licence to buy.
Weighing it against TechWolf? Read the two side by side. The decision comes down to whether you need the skills worked out from people’s work to reach your HR system, which TechWolf does and Microsoft People Skills does not.
What it does
It reads the documents, emails, chats and meetings your people already produce in Microsoft 365, runs large language models over them, and writes a list of skills onto the profile card of everyone licensed for it. The employee sees the list where they already work and can confirm or dismiss each one.
An administrator turns it on in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. First profiles appear for most people within about 48 hours, and Microsoft puts the longest wait at five days. After that it refreshes every 30 days, so a profile follows what somebody is working on now rather than what they did when they joined. Staff who hold only a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 enterprise licence wait longer. An administrator can switch the AI on for them if the company also holds Copilot licences, and Microsoft expects up to 15 days for the first skills, then a refresh typically every 180 days, so their profiles are slower both to appear and to keep up.
You can bring your own skills library alongside Microsoft’s, as long as it holds between 20 and 5,000 skills, with each file under 100 MB. You can also mark sensitive skills as restricted, so the AI never adds them to anyone’s profile. That matters in regulated work, where you may not want software deciding on its own that a person holds a particular skill.
Microsoft measures how often people confirm or reject the skills it suggests, aims “for the system to be accurate in aggregate”, and cites an accuracy of around 80%+, reported by early adopters when they checked the skills the AI suggested for them.
What you get is a skills profile of everyone licensed, built from their Microsoft 365 work, which stays inside Microsoft until each person confirms it.
What it is good at
Several things about People Skills work in a buyer’s favour, starting with how little it takes to try.
Trying it needs no new contract
If you already pay for Copilot or Viva, trying it needs only an administrator’s time. Before you pay for anything else, it will show you how much Microsoft 365 already knows about your people.
The skills list is already there
The built-in list holds more than 16,000 skills, and Microsoft describes it as powered by LinkedIn. You do not have to build or buy a skills list before you start.
Nobody has to fill in a form
If your company keeps skills today in a matrix that depends on people remembering to update it, compare People Skills with that before you compare it with TechWolf. It produces a profile without asking an employee to do anything, and the employee can correct it in the place they already work.
It can be switched off completely
An administrator can remove People Skills, and every skill it holds, from your organisation’s Microsoft 365, with most data deleted within 48 to 72 hours. Removal is permanent, though: Microsoft warns that deleted skills data will not come back if you set People Skills up again later.
Where it stops
You need the AI’s skills in another system
The skills the AI works out are the main thing the product gives you, and in Microsoft’s words, “Only confirmed skills can be exported. AI-generated (inferred) skills can’t be exported.” An employee has to confirm each skill before it can go anywhere. Even then, the way to export skills uses a beta version of Microsoft Graph, the connection other software uses to reach Microsoft 365 data. Microsoft says its beta versions may change and are not supported in live systems, so anything your IT team builds on that beta version to send skills into your HR system could need reworking when Microsoft changes it.
Your people work outside Microsoft 365
If your engineers live in Jira and your sellers live in Salesforce, the AI sees none of that work. In Microsoft’s words, “Currently, we only infer skills from Microsoft 365 sources and don’t use user activity in other line of business applications.” Skills already recorded in another system can be imported, though, so those people’s profiles need not rest on the AI alone.
You want it for pay or promotion decisions
Microsoft says People Skills is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, and what the product records about each person shows why. What the AI gives each person is a set of skill names, which the employee can confirm, remove, add to or reorder. When you add your own skills, the template asks only for an ID, a name, a description and whether the skill is restricted, with an optional second file that maps skills to jobs. Pay and promotion turn on how good someone is at a skill, and proficiency levels are not described in Microsoft’s People Skills documentation.
You want a person’s whole career
The AI reads only recent work: in Microsoft’s words, “The AI inferencing engine does not consider user activity older than 90 days.” So if someone spent two years on a platform migration and moved on more than 90 days ago, the AI no longer sees that work. Its suggestions describe a person’s recent work rather than their career, though people can always add older skills themselves.
Much of your workforce is frontline or in the field
Microsoft warns that “Performance may be limited for users who don’t spend considerable time in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (for example, frontline, field workers)”, so if a large part of your workforce works on the front line or out in the field, the AI will have less of their work to read. A paid product can show a frontline gap too, as TechWolf’s own T-Mobile case study does: where confirming skills was left to employees, confirmation stands at about 70% in back-office roles but about 32% across the company as a whole, with the gap “concentrated in frontline retail and care”.
Job titles are missing in your directory
Where a job title is missing, the system infers one before it infers skills, and Microsoft warns the accuracy “could be lower” in that case. So missing job titles in Microsoft Entra, your staff directory, can lead to less accurate skill suggestions, though you can upload separate job titles for it to use instead.
You run HR for education or government
People Skills comes with three Microsoft plans: one with standard Microsoft 365, one with Copilot and one with Viva. Education and government licences are excluded from the plans that come with standard Microsoft 365 and with Copilot, and Microsoft states no such exclusion for the plan that comes with Viva. If you run HR for a university, college, school or public body, ask Microsoft which plan, if any, you can use before you spend time evaluating it.
Readers need to tell imported skills from AI suggestions
Skills you import from another system are labelled “Imported by your organization” in the profile editor, but on the profile card itself, in Microsoft’s words, they “aren’t visually differentiated from inferred skills”. So anyone reading a card cannot tell which skills came from your own records and which the AI suggested.
Of these, the limit on exporting matters most, because it decides whether what the AI works out about your people is an asset your company owns or something that stays inside Microsoft services you rent.
What it costs
People Skills comes with Microsoft Copilot or Viva licences and needs no separate licence, so it costs $0 extra, so far, on top of the licence you already hold.
The cost that matters more than the licence is the campaign to get people to confirm their skills. Your people’s skills can be exported only once each employee has confirmed them, so the work of getting people to go through their own profiles is what turns this from an interesting report into data you can use somewhere else.
There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent
What to establish before you switch it on
- Where does our work happen? List the systems your people spend their working day in. If most of that time goes outside Microsoft 365, the AI will see only part of what they do.
- What will we do when we need the data somewhere else? Only skills a person has confirmed can be exported, so plan now how you will get people to confirm them, or accept that the AI’s suggestions stay inside Microsoft.
- Are the job titles in Entra complete? The AI uses job titles to work out skills, and its suggestions could be less accurate where a title is missing.
- Are we an education customer or a government body? If so, ask Microsoft which of its plans we can use before going further.
- What decision are we trying to make? If it concerns someone’s pay or promotion, base it on something other than People Skills.
Alternatives to Microsoft People Skills, including buying nothing
The main alternatives to Microsoft People Skills are TechWolf, which sends the skills it finds into Workday or SAP, and the skills modules already inside the large HR suites: Workday Skills Cloud, SAP Talent Intelligence Hub, Oracle Dynamic Skills and Cornerstone, or buying nothing beyond the licence you already hold.
People Skills will not put skills into Workday, SAP or a workforce plan for you. Workday and SAP can both take in skills from other systems, but connecting People Skills to either of them is a project for your IT team rather than a setting. If you need everything the AI finds to reach those systems, not just the confirmed skills, this product cannot get you there. That is the point at which the paid products start to make sense, and our guide to skills intelligence software sets out which of them look at the work people do and which only read your HR records.
If you already run one of the large HR or learning suites, find out what its own skills module gives you before you buy anything else. Workday Skills Cloud suggests skills from job profiles, projects, courses and other Workday records, and can calculate a skill level from assessments and ratings. On some Workday contracts it is switched on automatically and on others it needs a separate order form, so check which applies to your contract. SAP’s skills module needs no extra licence and keeps a skills list for each person, mostly self-rated and topped up from job roles, review forms and courses. The AI that suggests skills, though, needs a separately purchased AI units licence.
Going by Oracle’s 2023 guide, Dynamic Skills, Oracle’s skills module, comes at no additional cost for Oracle Global HR customers, so far. Oracle’s current contract terms list it alongside Global HR in the core subscription for its Fusion HR system, but only “where applicable”, so ask whether your contract covers it. Dynamic Skills records the skills each job requires, the skills people claim and the colleagues who vouch for them, and can suggest a rating from a short assessment that the employee is free to overrule. Cornerstone includes a ready-made skills library with its learning and talent products, but a skill it suggests plays no part in its estimate of how good someone is until the employee declares it or marks it as one they are developing. Its Skills Architect and People Graph add-ons cost extra.
There is also a third option, which is to switch People Skills on, read what comes back, and buy nothing. If your company’s work happens mainly inside Microsoft 365, what comes back may be enough to settle the question.