Microsoft is once again adding an AI-based feature to one of its online services. This time it's Microsoft Viva, the company's employee experience platform. Today. Microsoft announced a new feature in Viva called Skills that's designed to give employers more info on the abilities of their workers and help them add new skills if needed.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated that according to a survey of business leaders, 82 percent of them claim their employees will need to learn new skills as AI begins to be used more and more. The new Skills feature is designed to help employers find the types of skills each of their employees has.
The blog post stated:
Skills in Viva leverages the combined power of the Microsoft Graph—which provides employee activity signals across Microsoft 365 applications and services—and skills from the LinkedIn Skills Graph—a dynamic model that maps the global skills landscape, including how 39,000 unique skills relate to each other, to jobs, and to learning content. With AI reasoning applied on top of this data layer, Skills in Viva can intelligently infer an employee’s skills profile, providing Viva customers with an improved understanding of current workforce skills.
Employees can also use the Skills feature in Viva to confirm and manage their own skills and update their Microsoft 365 profile card with that information. Managers can use that information to create learning and education programs for their employees so they can learn new skills that they will need to deal with a changing work landscape.
Microsoft says that it will launch the Skills feature in Viva via a private preview test sometime before the end of the year. There's no word on when the new feature will enter general availability, but when it does it will be included as part of the Microsoft Viva suite.
