Microsoft 365 Copilot: New Navigation, Voice, and Context Enhancements Arriving Soon

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Here are three new updates to the user interface of Microsoft Copilot. These releases improve usability, expand interaction options, and streamline how users incorporate work content into prompts. All three of these features were actually announced "a long time ago", and the initial release started almost 6 months ago. But I guess the setup is complicated, as the rollout hasn't completed yet. This only proves the importance of paying attention to the official roadmap and the tenant message center in order to understand when features are being implemented for your organization. Timelines may continue to evolve as deployments progress, and this summary includes the official reference IDs and documentation links for verification. Refreshed Navigation Experience There is a redesigned navigation experience for the Microsoft 365 Copilot app heading your way, delivering a cleaner, more efficient layout. The update flattens the menu structure and groups related components to help...

People Skills: Empowering Organizations with AI-Driven Skill Insights

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Microsoft 365 Introduces People Skills:

In large organizations (or when you're new to one) finding the right people with the right skills can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack, and certainly time-consuming for you and everyone you ask. Talent may be all around, but visibility into the who what, and how well, is often limited. In an attempt to overcome this challenge, Microsoft is introducing two new service plans:
  • People Skills - Foundation, as part of the M365 license
  • People Skills - Advanced, as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Viva licenses. 
While the Foundation tier provides essential tools for managing and showcasing skills either by user updating their own profile or through organizational imports, the Advanced tier leverages AI to deliver deeper insights, such as identifying skill gaps, recommending development opportunities, and enhancing collaboration through intelligent skill matching.

Things to know for users and admins:

Once the feature is released, everyone gets the "Foundation" tier, and can then add skills to their own profile if they choose to do so. Also, users are in control of how their Skills can be added and shared on their profile. If the user have the advanced tier, they can also control how AI interacts in order to learn and populate each individual's list of skills. I think it is important for users to be informed of this.

As for admins, they can choose to control the default behavior of the advanced behaviour. The feature is called "Skills inferencing" and can be set to one of the following for users, groups or the entire tenant:
  • 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.
Here is a Learn article on how it works: Manage skills inferencing and visibility

The announcement from Microsoft has a lot of more in-depth information, and is a suggested read.

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