Somewhere inside your company’s systems, an AI skill profile may already exist with your name on it, built without you ever filling out a form.
Microsoft calls this capability People Skills. It reached wide availability across Microsoft 365 earlier this year, and it works by scanning ordinary Microsoft Graph activity, emails, documents, meetings, and chats, then matching patterns in that activity to a built in skills list. The result shows up as an AI skill profile on the Microsoft 365 profile card, visible inside Outlook, Teams, and Office.com. For most eligible users the feature is turned on automatically, with an option to opt out rather than an option to opt in from the start.
Not sure whether any of this applies to you specifically? The fastest way to find out is to open your own profile card in Outlook, Teams, or Office.com. If a Skills section appears with suggestions already listed, tracking is active for your account. If it does not appear, either the feature has not reached you yet, or your organization has not turned it on.
None of this means the system knows you better than you know yourself. Microsoft’s own transparency documentation is explicit that these inferences depend on the signals available to it and may not fully reflect your actual skills or abilities. That is exactly why checking your own AI skill profile matters. The picture forming in the background deserves your input, not just your employer’s.
Here is how to take a look, step by step.
1. Find your profile card. Click your name or photo in Outlook, Teams, or Office.com. Your profile card opens, and a Skills section appears if your organization has this feature enabled.
2. Review what the AI has inferred. Read through the suggested skills carefully. Some will feel accurate. Others may reflect a project you touched once, not a skill you actually have.
3. Confirm or correct each one. You can confirm skills that are right, reject ones that are not, and add skills the system missed. Confirmed skills are what other people at your company will actually see.
4. Decide whether to opt out. If you would rather manage your own profile manually, that option exists. It is worth knowing that this control extends to organizations too: Microsoft is currently rolling out a new admin setting that lets a company delete its entire People Skills library, including every confirmed, inferred, and imported skill. If your organization ever chooses to turn the feature off completely, that is now a real option on their end as well.
5. Use it as a starting point, not a verdict. An inferred skill list is a conversation starter with your manager about where you are headed next, not a final judgment on your career.
Why Your AI Skill Profile Deserves a Second Look
An AI skill profile is not just a passive summary sitting quietly on a profile card. Managers increasingly use these profiles as a quick reference when staffing a project, considering someone for a stretch assignment, or preparing for a performance conversation. A profile that is accurate, current, and reviewed by you carries real weight in those moments. A profile that is stale, incomplete, or built entirely from AI guesswork carries that same weight without your input in it. The difference between those two outcomes is not luck. It comes down to whether you have actually opened your profile card and looked.
An AI skill profile is only useful if a human reviews it. Left unchecked, it is just a guess wearing the appearance of data.
AI does the work. The judgment is still yours. That is true of a skill profile the same way it is true of any other AI output: worth reviewing, worth correcting, never worth accepting blindly. Treat your AI skill profile the way you would treat a first draft someone else wrote about your career. Read it closely, keep what is accurate, and fix what is not before anyone else builds a decision on top of it.
This is the kind of quiet shift Global AI Leaders (GAIL) Stand Out at Your Job pathway is built, to help you navigate with intention, not just react to after the fact.
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Sources referenced in this post:
Microsoft Support: Overview of People Skills, 2026
Microsoft Support: AI Transparency in People Skills, 2026
Microsoft Learn: Manage your skills library in People Skills, 2026