Meet your new Copilot 365 assistants: Skills agent, Interpreter agent, Project agent and the facilitator

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Making your tasks easier for you: The other day I wrote about the new Skills feature coming to Microsoft 365 in the following weeks. But the Advanced tier os the new skills feature is just one of three out-of-the-box agents already in place or coming the next weeks and months (and many more in the future, I'm sure). This agents are designed to handle "everything" from simple tasks to complex multi-step processes where you choose to implement them. In this rather length post, I’ll try to break down each agent’s capabilities, why they’re useful, and how you can prepare to make the most of them. Skill Discovery (Skills Agent – Powered by People Skills) Let's start with the skills agent. In my previous post, I mentioned the release of the "skills feature" that will be released in two tiers. One basic, and one advanced. The advanced tier is driven by AI, more specific the "Skills agent". This agent is all about connecting people and expertise. The agent...

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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