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New Service to Manage People Skills in an Organization
The April 23, 2025, announcement about the general availability of People Skills, “a powerful new data layer in Microsoft 365 Copilot” is now being followed by the deployment of People Skills to tenants as described in MC1060842 (last updated 3 June 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 485726). Microsoft expects deployment to complete worldwide in mid-July 2025.
People Skills Licensing
Along with the deployment, MC1060845 says that Microsoft is updating Office 365 and Microsoft 365 licenses to include the People Skills Foundation service plan (PEOPLE_SKILLS_FOUNDATION, 13b6da2c-0d84-450e-9f69-a33e221387ca). According to the licensing section of the People Skills documentation, “People Skills comes with your Microsoft 365 or Viva licenses and doesn’t need a separate license.” Other People Skills licenses are available, and Microsoft once again is in danger of confusing customers with licensing. I think Figure 1 boils the licensing situation down to two buckets.
Users with the foundation service plan (included with licenses such as Office 365 E3) can “search to add skills from your taxonomy or imported skills to create a skills profile using the Microsoft 365 profile editor.” In other words, these users can access skill information through the Microsoft 365 profile card and Outlook’s Org Explorer and update their skills via the Microsoft 365 profile editor. Users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses can do more, like use the Skills agent to look for people with specific skills in the organization. Or as Microsoft puts it, the agent “helps employees and leaders explore, manage, and use organizational skills for personal growth and strategic planning.”
This list of where skills data appears in Microsoft 365 is worth reading. Not everything is available today, but you can see where Microsoft is heading.
Setting Up People Skills
Before any skills appear in public view, a tenant must go through the People Skills setup process. The setup option is available in the Settings (choose Viva, then data management) or Copilot sections of the Microsoft 365 admin center. Microsoft recommends a quick setup (Figure 2) to configure the People Skills service with default settings, including a skills library of some 16,297 different areas of expertise that people might have.
The setup process runs in the background and takes at least a day to finish. It seems like much of the time taken is to allow skills interferencing by AI to happen. This means that an AI agent examines the details of users and their activity (Graph-based access to email, Teams messages, and documents) to figure out what skills each user might have. For instance, someone with a “Software architect” job title probably knows something about software architecture, and their communications with other users will probably reveal what areas of software architecture they work in. If this sounds creepy, you can disable the feature using Viva policies managed through PowerShell.
For example, these commands reveal the set of features that can be managed through the PeopleSkills module and create a new policy to disable skills interferencing for members of a specific distribution list:
Get-VivaModuleFeature -ModuleId PeopleSkills Add-VivaModuleFeaturePolicy -Module PeopleSkills -FeatureId SkillsInferencing -IsFeatureEnabled $false -GroupIds NoSkills@office365itpros.com -Name TurnOffSkillsInterferencing
The Get-VivaModuleFeatureEnablement cmdlet checks if the feature is disabled for a user:
Get-VivaModuleFeatureEnablement -ModuleId PeopleSkills -FeatureId SkillsInferencing -Identity Marty.King@office365itpros.com FeatureId Enabled --------- ------- SkillsInferencing False
Note that if Skills inferencing has already happened for a user, it will take several days for the information to disappear from their user profile. Speaking of profiles, Figure 3 shows how AI-inferenced skills appear in my Microsoft 365 profile card. The skills listed here aren’t confirmed. In other words, they are skills that the AI agents thinks that I might have based on the knowledge available to it (I won’t get upset by the poor spelling of PowerShell).
I’m not sure about some of these skills (like decision making). By selecting the Update your profile option, I can select which skills I agree I have (Figure 4), add some more skills that the AI overlooked by selecting from the skills inventory, and confirm the set. Confirmed skills show up with a blue tick mark when people view the profile card.
Graph API
A ListSkills Graph API is available for the Profile resource type to list the set of skills for a user account. The API uses the User.Read delegated permission and no application permission is available. In other words, you can’t use the API to create a report of skills for every user in the organization. Here’s how to use the Get-MgBetaUserProfileSkill cmdlet from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to list the skills of the signed in user:
Get-MgBetaUserProfileSkill -UserId (Get-MgContext).Account | Sort-Object DisplayName | Format-Table DisplayName, allowedAudiences, CreatedDateTime DisplayName AllowedAudiences CreatedDateTime ----------- ---------------- --------------- Application Development organization 11/06/2025 08:46:52 Application Programming Interfaces (API) organization 11/06/2025 08:46:52 Artificial Intelligence (AI) organization 11/06/2025 08:46:53 Business Intelligence (BI) organization 11/06/2025 08:46:53 Business Management organization 11/06/2025 08:46:52 Business Negotiation organization 11/06/2025 08:46:52 Change Management organization 11/06/2025 08:46:53
Some People Skills Oddities
Of course, the combination of skills determined by AI and the user might not actually be true. I could claim to be a Hyper-V expert (I’m not), and the AI might think that I know something about SharePoint Online because I’ve written about the topic often. Oddly, the AI concluded that I know something about Exchange but not about SharePoint, Teams, Planner, or other Microsoft 365-related topics. Although PowerShell is a skill, Microsoft Graph isn’t listed in the skills inventory. I tried to add some custom skills by following the steps in the documentation (requiring a CSV upload to SharePoint is bizarre), but the admin center couldn’t find the CSV uploaded to a site that I owned, no matter what form of a path I used.
The skills used by the latest iteration of skill highlighting and management within Microsoft 365 are not the same as those captured in SharePoint Online or Delve (User Profile Application or UPA skills). According to the documentation, once you enable People Skills, the UPA skills are hidden from the user profile card. This might happen in the future, but I see both sets of skills listed today. Another future is migration of UPA skills to People Skills. Microsoft says that this will happen but hasn’t yet clarified how or when. Perhaps migration isn’t in their current skill set?
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thanks for sharing Tony.
specially one specific info… which helped us a lot..that admins needs to complete skills setup before users can start using this feature….
this information is not well document and missed in microsoft articles, also did not find it clearly stated in other public blog sources..
very clear and detailed analysis..