Hello Champions!
Here’s a recap and top Q+A from our April M365 Champions monthly call of 2026, featuring: Enabling AI‑Driven Workforce Transformation with People Skills and Workforce Insights Agent with Anirudh Bajaj ,Microsoft Senior Product Manager and Jenny Huang, Microsoft Senior Customer Experience Program manager.
We kicked off the call with the annoucement of our digital premiere of More Than Code: SharePoint community film. More Than Code is a documentary-style short film featuring voices from MVPs, customers, and Microsoft leaders. Discover how connection, creativity, and collaboration helped turn a product into a global movement. Click here to watch the digital premiere today!
Anirudh Bajaj and Jenny Huang led the main topic this month with a deep dive into People Skills and Workforce Insights Agent. First, Anirudh highlighted a shift in how organizations must approach AI—moving beyond simply using AI tools to actively redesigning workflows around them. He introduced People Skills as a foundational capability to enable this transformation by providing visibility into workforce skills through AI-powered inferencing. By analyzing Microsoft 365 activity and combining it with a large pre-built skills taxonomy, the solution generates dynamic skill profiles for employees that can be validated or customized by users. These skills power scenarios such as finding experts, improving collaboration, and enabling personalized learning. Anirudh emphasized privacy and user control, noting that employees can manage their profiles, opt out of inferencing, and control sharing, while admins can configure governance policies.
Next, Anirudh introduced his colleague Jenny Huang who introduced us to the Workforce Insights Agent. The Workforce Insights Agent is designed to help leaders translate skills and organizational data into actionable decisions. She framed the agent within the growing need for strategic workforce planning in an AI-driven environment, where leaders must quickly understand team structure, skills distribution, and emerging gaps. The agent integrates data from Microsoft 365 profiles and external HR systems, enabling leaders to query organizational data conversationally and receive real-time insights, visualizations, and recommendations. Jenny outlined key use cases such as analyzing team composition, identifying hiring or skill gaps, and guiding talent movement and upskilling strategies. Currently available in the Microsoft Frontier program, the agent emphasizes governed data access and encourages customer feedback to shape its evolution toward general availability, positioning it as a critical decision-support tool for AI-driven organizational transformation.
Q+A from this month's session:
1. When will the Workforce Insights Agent be generally available (GA)?
Answer: There is no confirmed GA timeline yet. The team is actively relying on customer feedback from the Frontier program to determine readiness and scope before moving to GA.
2. Can we add a two layer skill approval? so we are getting confirmation person is actually skilled in "skill"? and then add levels (1 - beginner, 5 - expert (teaching level professional)?
Answer: We have not added expertise levels to the People Skills as an "expert" is very subjective and defined differently by organizations, and organizations have different level requirements (1-to-5 vs 1-to-10 vs categories (expert, beginner etc.) so it is challenging to standardize this. We are exploring offering skill depth/context in certain contexts e.g. while matching a person to an open role- to understand their skill depth. More to come on this.
3. People Skill AI - What is the distinction between this and Workforce Insights?
Answer: People Skills AI inferencing uses intelligence to make skill recommendation (AI inferred skills) . This is a data layer that is used by Copilot and Workforce Insights Agent to help you with decision making.
4. Can you help me understand what Agents explicitly we are talking about? There used to be a 'Skills' Agent, which I can no longer see in my environment (Frontier). I also cant see a 'People' Agent. I do however see a 'workforce insights' agent.
Answer: Skills agent and People agent are both retired in March and the capabilities are now folded into M365 Copilot chat and Workforce Insights agent.
5. Can these People skills be fed into a program like Workday, so they can be added to the Skills Cloud and be used for promotions, reviews, etc.?
Answer: Confirmed skills in People Skills can be exported for you to use it in other platforms/systems. Due to privacy reason, we are not allowed to provide export on inferred skills.
6. Is Viva Engage included in E5 licensing?
Answer: Yes! The core/standard experience is included the E5 license, which does include communities and integration in Teams.
7. Are these calls recorded and/or archived so we can review later?
Answer: Yes, the recording will be published on the Driving Adoption community and our YouTube Community Learning channel. However, only Champion program members have access to the presentation (see the link in your welcome email or the latest newsletter). If you're not a member yet, join here: https://aka.ms/BecomeAChampion.
8. Is frontier a paid programme?
Answer: It's not an additional to your M365 Copilot license, but you do need to opt into the program. More info here: Explore AI Early Access in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Frontier
9. Is the People Skills Agent and Learning Agent available to Copilot Chat Basic users or only the paid version of Copilot?
Answer: People Skills agent was deprecated in March and the capability are now available through M365 Copilot chat and Workforce Insights agent for M365 Copilot licensed users.
10. Can you see aggregated information from People Skills? Like see what level people are at with AI across the enterprise?
Answer: There are 2 aspects here: one is skills aggregation report and another one is skills level/proficiency. The first part can be done via skills landscape report (via Viva Insights, shown as a Power BI report), or through Workforce Insights agent which I will share more later Ani's presentation. On skills level/proficiency piece, it's not available today in People Skills.
11. Can you also add linkedin profile to the sources for People Skills inference?
Answer: Not directly the profile but if you have an inventory of what skills are attached/assigned to an user, you can import the list into People Skills as 3rd party skills.
12. On an enterprise level can an organisation navigate a recommended career path for an employee based on their people skills? How does this data show up?
Answer: Today Copilot can make general career and learning recommendations for users based on their skills. However, People Skills does not yet support career path suggestions based on job architecture/open job roles.
13. Are these features only managed by the Admins? We have a single tenant so our Agency doesn't have access to the Admin console. Many of these Admin features are not usable for us without a more granular way to manage them.
Answer: The admin controls can be set up by someone with the right permissions, these roles can do it today:
- AI administrator
- Knowledge administrator
- Global admin
14. We are a multi-cloud environment (commercial and GCCH). Will these agents eventually be available on GCCH?
Answer: People Skills is currently only available in WW environment, we don't have an estimate on when we will be in GCC.
15. Am I understanding correctly that the PAX API allows access to our tenant's data by a third party? What data controls guide that interaction?
Answer: You can bring in 3P data via connectors or push APIs into MODIS and apply access control there.
16. Who can access the Workforce Insights Agent?
Answer: Any user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can access the agent. Currently, only through the Frontier program.
- The tenant must also meet requirements (e.g., sufficient Copilot licenses in the environment).
17. Where does Workforce Insights Agent get its data from?
Answer: Default data comes from Microsoft 365 profiles (Entra). Additional data can be brought in via:
- HR systems (Workday, SuccessFactors)
- APIs or CSV uploads
Please note: Sensitive data is governed using strict data policies and access controls.
18. Do users have control over their skills and data?
Answer: Users are able to:
- Confirm, edit, or remove inferred skills
- Add their own skills manually
- Opt out of AI inferencing entirely
- Control whether their skills are shared across the organization
19. Can admins control how People Skills is deployed?
Answer:
- Enable/disable the feature by user, group, or tenant
- Control inferencing and sharing settings
- Apply privacy and compliance policies
- Pilot the feature in a limited scope before broad rollout
20. What are the main use cases of Workforce Insights Agent?
Answer: The agent helps with:
- Understanding team structure and composition
- Identifying skill gaps and distribution
- Supporting workforce planning decisions
- Driving talent movement and upskilling strategies
Join us next month on May 26th for our next community call featuring Copilot Hub & Agents 365.
- Haven't joined the program yet? It's free! Join here: https://aka.ms/M365Champion.
- Bring your questions to our discussion forum: https://aka.ms/DriveAdoption.
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