Today Microsoft announced a wide range of Copilot features, many focused on Agents (research agent and analyst agent, agent development and management tools, and personal productivity features).
But one feature set that is significant to HR is Microsoft’s new?skills infrastructure: a skills-inference agent (and a skills management agent) that lets companies identify and monitor the skills of all their employees. This announcement, which has been in development for several years, has the potential to radically change the HR Tech landscape.
First let me explain what this is. If you license MS Copilot and MS 365, Microsoft will automatically “discover” each employee’s skills and give you a Skills Agent to view and manage the skills in your team. You can use Microsoft’s skills taxonomy or map it to your own.
How does it work? MS People Skills infers individual’s skillsets from user profiles and activity mapped to a customizable taxonomy. This data layer fuels the Skill Agent, which feeds Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365, and Viva services.
The new Skill Agent lets leaders and staff find experts in the organization, understand colleague’s skillsets, edit their own skill profiles, and make informed decisions about skill development. And by using the Copilot, you can build development plans, staff projects, and assess skills throughout the company.
For LinkedIn users, the taxonomy is mapped to LinkedIn’s taxonomy. This means all employees can use consolidate their profiles and skills between LinkedIn and their internal profiles.
(This video explains how the skills inference model and how the pieces fit together.)
Implications Of This Announcement
This announcement has the potential to disrupt and change the entire HR Tech market. Almost every major HCM vendor (Workday, SAP, Oracle, Eightfold, and most recruiting and learning platforms) has a skills tagging system, skills inference system, and skills interoperability layer. Vendors like Lightcast and Draup crowdsource and infer skills with massive AI agents to determine skills by job role for every job posting in the world. (Galileo embeds the Lightcast model into it’s tool set.)
Microsoft now takes all this investment and makes it actionable, useful, and manageable across every Microsoft-powered enterprise. And a new Skills Agent is going to perform tasks like resource management, project staffing, skills based workforce planning, and other applications.
Not only is this a fantastic and pragmatic tool for skills management (it’s embedded right into your internal Microsoft profile), it obsoletes the need for some of these other systems. While many of the incumbent vendors are well down the learning curve, Microsoft has the benefit of using its AI inference across hundreds of millions to billions of users. So if Microsoft invests in this toolset it could become one of the most definitive sources of skills data for employees in large companies.
Consider a company who has invested in the Workday Skills Cloud, Eightfold, Gloat, or Techwolf. These are all skills technology platforms, designed to store and map skills and infer them through various methods. If Microsoft does this within the Microsoft Graph, it may compete with or even overtake these other platforms because of its large data set. So over time, if Microsoft invests in this technology, some of these players become commoditized.
This happens often when Microsoft enters a market. The early stage product may not be highly competitive, but over time the company perseveres and its product overcomes competitors. (SQL Server, PowerBI, and others have accomplished this.) So while this product is new, it’s comprehensive architecture and potential links to Copilot make it a product to watch and consider.
Finally, consider the strategic applications of this system. The MS 365 Graph is one of the most data-rich sources of information about employees (especially if employees use the Copilot). If Microsoft stays focused on this area we’re likely to see vast amount of organizational planning, design, and employee development tools leverage this toolset.
A Major New Market for Microsoft Copilot
Imagine if your company turned this on and you then use the Copilot to analyze data. Suddenly the Copilot could help with strategic workforce planning, job and org design, development planning, and much more. And if you connect the Copilot to Galileo (which we’re working on), you could now use the Copilot coupled with Galileo as your internal mobility tool (who should we staff for a given project?), career planning system (what jobs inside the company am I qualified for?) and more. See where I’m going?
Microsoft has put a lot of energy into this new People Skills platform. The potential for business users, HR, and HR Tech disruption is enormous.
Additional Information
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