News

Microsoft Viva Suite To Add Copilot AI Capabilities and Glint This Year

• By Kurt Mackie
• 04/21/2023

Microsoft on Thursday announced multiple product enhancements to its Viva "employee experience platform" suite, including Copilot artificial intelligence additions, as part of its Microsoft Viva Summit online presentation.

Additionally, Microsoft announced that LinkedIn's Glint employee feedback and assessment solution will reach "general availability" as part of the Microsoft Viva Suite in "July 2023." It'll be called "Viva Glint" and will be available at that time as a "standalone app" as well. Microsoft is planning to add Copilot AI capabilities to Glint "later this year," too, per this Viva announcement.

Microsoft Glint
Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so Glint's emergence as a Microsoft Viva product isn't too surprising. Glint had already been a bundling option with the Viva suite, which Microsoft had announced last year. It currently costs more to bundle Glint with the four Viva suite applications (Connections, Engage, Learning and Insights), according to Microsoft's pricing page. Future pricing details with the coming Glint Viva suite inclusion weren't described in Microsoft's Thursday announcements.

Glint already uses AI to help managers spot "at-risk employee populations," the Viva announcement noted. The Copilot addition will enhance Glint's capabilities to summarize employee comments from surveys, and let leaders "analyze employee sentiments by posing questions in their own words."

Microsoft also is integrating Microsoft Glint with Microsoft Graph data and Viva Insights, which measures employee time use.

"With the integration of behavioral data from Viva Insights into the employee sentiment data from Viva Glint, organizations can get a holistic understanding of the employee experience to correlate how people feel with how they work to drive business improvements," the Viva announcement indicated.

This collection of employee information was said to be "aggregated and de-identified."

Such a notion was emphasized as well by Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president for modern work and business applications, regarding the Copilot integrations into Microsoft Viva suite applications.

Here's Spataro's characterization to that effect during the Microsoft Viva Summit presentation:

Every Copilot feature has passed privacy checks, been tested by experts and is monitored in real time. Copilot automatically inherits your organization's security compliance and privacy policies and the Copilot large language models are never trained on your tenant data.

Microsoft also noted that it is using Glint in place of its own Microsoft annual survey of employees. The Glint version of the survey used by Microsoft is called "Employee Signals."

"Rolling out Glint across Microsoft allows us to provide more actionable insights to our managers to help our employees thrive," Microsoft indicated in this Viva and Glint announcement.

Copilot Integrations
Copilot is basically getting integrated into most, if not all, of the Viva suite applications, with completion targeted for later this year. Microsoft's first production-environment-ready Copilot integration with a Viva app was with Viva Sales' AI-generated e-mail reply capability. That capability reached general availability last month.

In addition Copilot integrations into Glint and Viva Sales, Microsoft announced coming Copilot integrations with:

• Viva Engage
• Viva Topics and
• Viva Goals

The only announcement lacking the Copilot flourish seemed to be Microsoft's progress report on Viva Learning, which will be getting a new expert-curated "Academies" collection of learning resources for end user home pages. Viva Learning also has API additions for learning providers and learning content that are now generally available. Microsoft also released Viva Learning access via a "web endpoint," which is now generally available.

Work Trend Index Report
Microsoft also on Thursday announced a new special report as part of its ongoing Work Trend Index series. The theme this time around was that engaged employees are good for a company's bottom-line financials.

"On average, each additional point of engagement reported by employees correlated with a +$46,511 difference in market cap per employee," Microsoft's announcement stated regarding the report, "The New Performance Equation in the Age of AI."

The value of boosting employee engagement was also promoted during the Microsoft Viva Summit online presentation. Other themes included using "people science" in organizations, and, in that regard, Microsoft offered some tips to inspire employees. Microsoft also offered its analysis on "people success elements" for organizations to adopt.