„Nicht wer du bist, sondern was du kannst, entscheidet über deine Rolle.“ – Ein Paradigmenwechsel, der gerade dabei ist, unsere Arbeitswelt auf den Kopf zu s...

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 sk...

In this podcast I discuss the four huge transformations taking place in corporate learning & development, all driven by AI. Join me in the discussion here and you can learn more in The [Josh Bersin Academy](https://bersinacademy.com), where we just launched our [AI in HR Course](https://bersinacademy.com/courses/ai-in-hr) and two mobile-learning micro-courses on AI use cases and Generative AI best-practices. Outline: - The learning and development industry is going through a significant reinvention driven by AI and other emerging technologies. - AI is disrupting the traditional instructional delivery paradigm by automating content creation and personalizing learning experiences. - The learning and development technology stack is undergoing radical changes, with learning management systems being commoditized and learning experience platforms struggling to define their role. - The consumption of learning is becoming hyper-personalized, and learning and knowledge management are converging. - The roles in L&D will totally change. Additional Information [Introducing Galileo, The World’s First AI-Powered Expert Assistant For HR](https://joshbersin.com/2023/11/galileo/) [HR Predictions for 2024: The Global Search For Productivity](https://joshbersin.com/2024/01/hr-predictions-for-2024-the-global-search-for-productivity/) [Why Do Companies Hire Too Many People?](https://joshbersin.com/2024/02/why-do-companies-hire-too-many-people/)

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