Helix vs Microsoft Copilot: Comparing AI tools for skills development

AI has drastically changed the way organisations develop their people. But while many businesses already use Microsoft Copilot to improve productivity, a growing number are asking a different question: Can Copilot actually measure and develop employee skills?

And it can – to an extent – but skills development isn't what it was built for.

If your goal is understanding workforce capabilities, identifying skill gaps, tracking behavioural development and delivering personalised coaching, you'll likely need a specialist platform alongside (or instead of) a general-purpose AI assistant – something like Helix, 5app’s AI skills intelligence platform.

Here's how Helix compares with Microsoft Copilot for skills measurement and development.

Helix vs Microsoft Copilot at a glance

What is Helix?

Helix is 5app’s AI-powered skills intelligence platform designed specifically to help organisations understand, measure and develop human skills.

Rather than simply generating content, Helix continuously identifies evidence of skills in real workplace interactions.

That means organisations can:

• measure leadership capability
• understand communication strengths
• identify coaching opportunities
• benchmark teams
• monitor development over time
• personalise learning journeys

Instead of asking employees to complete self-assessments or waiting until annual reviews to discuss skills development, Helix captures objective behavioural evidence as people work.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant integrated across Microsoft 365 applications including Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Its primary strengths are helping employees:

• summarise meetings
• draft emails
• analyse documents
• create presentations
• answer questions
• automate everyday work

For productivity, Copilot is excellent, but measuring employee skills wasn't its original design goal.

What is Copilot People Skills?

On top of Copilot, there is a plugin, People Skills (previously Skills in Viva), which can be used to measure employee skills, but you need a Copilot licence for the full AI-powered skills experience, with a basic, non-AI version available for those without Copilot licences.

It’s worth noting that People Skills is not a standalone skills intelligence platform. The full AI-powered experience requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, meaning organisations need to invest in the wider Copilot ecosystem to access AI-driven skills inference.

People Skills maps skills such as project management, strategic planning and presentation skills to a customisable skills taxonomy. It infers these skills from things like documents you’ve created, emails, Microsoft Teams chats and collaboration patterns.

Instead of measuring specific skills, People Skills is more commonly used to find employees with a specific skill, such as “Who in team X is a strong negotiator?” or “Who in team Y has managed large, complex projects?”, making it more useful at the enterprise level rather than for individuals.

Skills measurement: specialist platform vs general AI assistant

Skills measurement is the biggest difference between Helix and Copilot.

Copilot can certainly help someone reflect on their performance. For example, a manager could ask: "Based on this meeting transcript, how well did I demonstrate active listening?", and Copilot may provide useful observations.

However, every analysis depends on the prompt, results aren't stored and progress isn't tracked. Instead, users need to manually ask Copilot to analyse specific skills in each meeting, or to ask reflective questions relating to the skills displayed.

Helix performs these activities automatically. Using AI skills intelligence and 5app’s proprietary 3Q Engine, it evaluates conversations against defined behavioural frameworks, producing consistent skills assessments across individuals, teams and organisations, creating a far richer picture of workforce capability.

With the latest Helix capabilities, this analysis becomes increasingly personalised over time. Rather than assessing a single meeting in isolation, Helix builds a broader picture based on multiple conversations it has access to, allowing recommendations and development insights to evolve as it learns more about an individual's strengths and opportunities.

Developing skills, not just identifying them

Knowing where someone needs to improve is only half the challenge. The next step is actually helping them develop their skills.

Helix integrates directly with VeeCoach, 5app’s AI coaching agent, creating a seamless AI-powered coaching experience. Once a development opportunity has been identified, VeeCoach can:

• recommend personalised learning
• reinforce new behaviours
• provide coaching conversations
• support practice between formal learning
• encourage continuous improvement.

Rather than stopping at measurement, organisations can create a complete development loop from insight to action.

Helix can also connect identified skills gaps with relevant learning content. Organisations can map courses, resources and development activities directly to specific skills, ensuring learning is delivered when it is most relevant. Rather than relying on employees to search through large content libraries, Helix helps surface the right support at the moment it is needed.

While it’s possible to request skills development from Copilot, it’s not built for that purpose, so coaching is more likely to be generic and not personalised to your own skills needs.

Freedom from ecosystem lock-in

One of Helix's biggest advantages is flexibility.

Microsoft Copilot works best when your organisation already lives inside Microsoft 365. And for businesses committed to the Microsoft ecosystem, that's perfectly reasonable. But many organisations use a mixture of learning technologies, or may not use the Microsoft technology stack at all.

Helix is designed to fit into existing learning environments rather than replace them.

It integrates with:

• any LMS (like The Hub!)
• learning experience platforms (LXPs)
• coaching platforms
• HR systems
• existing learning ecosystems

Helix can also monitor skills in meetings hosted on:

• Microsoft Teams
• Google Meet
• Zoom

That means organisations can keep the technology they already use (even if that’s Microsoft!) while adding powerful AI skills intelligence. You're not required to move your learning strategy into a single vendor ecosystem, ensuring Helix slots seamlessly into any organisation’s tech stack.

Measuring behavioural skills that matter

Modern organisations increasingly recruit and promote based on human skills. These include:

• Communication
• Coaching
• Change management
• Results focus
• Strategic vision

Organisations can also apply their own skills frameworks, whether that’s a leadership model like transformational leadership, competency framework, technical capability model or existing organisational taxonomy. This means Helix complements existing investments in skills architecture rather than requiring businesses to replace what they already have.

Traditional approaches often rely on self-assessments, surveys or manager observations, which can provide useful perspectives but are also influenced by perception and individual bias. Helix adds another layer of objective behavioural evidence by analysing how skills are demonstrated in real workplace conversations.

Helix focuses specifically on identifying evidence of these behaviours in real workplace interactions, giving organisations far greater visibility into skills that are often invisible.

To be clear, users can still ask Copilot to analyse these skills. However, it will require manual prompting, and Copilot isn’t designed to remember skills progress and development over time, so users will get skill snapshots rather than a deep understanding of ongoing progress.

Alternatively, Copilot licence holders can use People Skills, but this is targeted more towards the enterprise level rather than for an individual’s personal skills development.

Enterprise insights for L&D leaders

For learning teams, individual coaching is only part of the picture.

Leaders also need answers like:

• Which leadership skills are improving?
• Where are our biggest capability gaps?
• Which departments need additional support?
• Is our leadership programme actually working?
• Are coaching interventions changing behaviour?

By connecting skills data with learning interventions, organisations can move beyond measuring completion rates and start understanding whether learning is changing behaviour. Helix helps L&D teams demonstrate the impact of their programmes, identify where investment is working and focus resources where they will have the greatest effect.

Helix provides organisation-wide analytics designed specifically for learning and HR teams. For instance, L&D teams will have access to heatmaps and aggregated data across teams, allowing them to see where learning is working, where there are skill gaps and where to invest their budget next.

Copilot, by comparison, focuses on helping individual users complete tasks more efficiently. It’s a brilliant productivity tool, but it won’t provide the L&D or HR team with the data they need to make decisions based on real skills. The People Skills plugin provides these insights, but again, the AI-powered solution is only available to Copilot licence holders.

Can Helix and Copilot work together?

Absolutely!

Many organisations continue using Microsoft Copilot for everyday productivity while using Helix to understand and develop workforce capability.

The two platforms solve different problems:

• Copilot helps people work smarter.
• Helix helps organisations build stronger people.

Used together, they can create a more intelligent workplace where productivity and capability development go hand in hand. The best AI tools work seamlessly together, and Helix and Copilot are a great example of this.

How do Helix and Copilot support skills development?

The biggest difference is that Helix is designed around skills development as the primary use case, whereas Microsoft Copilot (even with People Skills) supports skills development as an extension of its broader workplace AI ecosystem.

Helix for skills development

Helix follows a development loop where it measures behaviour in context, and provides personalised skills development content and interventions based on its insights:

1. Observe – joins meetings as a silent participant and analyses conversations.
2. Measure – identifies evidence of specific skills being demonstrated (for example, communication, coaching or strategic vision).
3. Feedback – highlights strengths and development opportunities.
4. Develop – recommends targeted learning, coaching or practice activities.
5. Track – measures progress as new conversations take place.

Helix comes integrated with VeeCoach, 5app’s AI coaching agent, as standard, ensuring all users have 24/7 access to AI coaching opportunities, and can also surface relevant content from the learning management system (LMS) for further development. This helps businesses get more value from their content libraries, as courses and resources are proactively recommended to learners rather than being left to gather dust.

Copilot for skills development

Copilot’s approach is more focused on skills visibility and enabling people to find and apply expertise:

1. Infer skills from Microsoft 365 work activity.
2. Build employee skill profiles.
3. Surface expertise across the organisation.
4. Help employees discover learning opportunities through Microsoft learning experiences.
5. Use Copilot as an AI assistant to help employees learn, create content and complete tasks.

Microsoft Copilot provides more of a ‘skills library’, where employee skills are mapped and made visible to business leaders. While Copilot can provide some degree of coaching, it’s not designed for this purpose, so it’s unlikely to be the best option for targeted skills development.

Is it easier to get started with Helix or Microsoft Copilot?

This depends on your current setup.

If your business already uses Microsoft Copilot, People Skills is included, and effectively ‘free’. However, it’s not specifically designed as a skills development tool, and focuses more on insights than continuous improvement.

Helix is platform agnostic, and can be used with any product suite (such as Microsoft or Google). It’s also possible to start small with Helix and scale up. For instance, it’s possible for an individual manager to try measuring their own skills with Helix, and if they like it, they can rapidly roll the solution out across the rest of the team or business.

Helix also allows organisations to start at any level of adoption. For example, a CEO or individual leader can use Helix to understand their own development opportunities before expanding across teams or the wider organisation. This provides a lower-risk way to experience the value of skills intelligence before committing to an enterprise-wide rollout.

Heli can be up and running in just a few clicks, whereas Copilot requires more setting up – especially if you’re not already a Copilot user, as it will require setting up a paid Copilot account before getting started.

Which platform should I choose between Helix and Microsoft Copilot?

Choosing between Helix and Microsoft Copilot depends on your objectives. They’re not exactly the same, and the way they measure skills differs significantly.

Choose Microsoft Copilot (and People Skills) if your priority is:

• AI assistance inside Microsoft 365
• document creation
• meeting summaries
• email drafting
• productivity improvements
• enterprise-level business insights

Choose Helix if your priority is:

• measuring workforce skills
• identifying capability gaps
• developing leadership behaviours
• access to on-demand coaching
• learning impact
• continuous skills intelligence
• vendor-neutral integration with your existing learning technology (including the Microsoft suite)

If you're looking beyond productivity and want to understand how people are growing, a specialist AI skills intelligence platform like Helix offers significantly deeper capabilities.

Unlike tools tied to a single technology stack, Helix is vendor-neutral. Organisations can use it alongside Microsoft 365, any LMS or their existing learning technology, all without being locked into one ecosystem. It also works with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom to track skills in real-time during normal work meetings.

The choice isn't necessarily Helix or Copilot. Copilot helps people work smarter across the business, while Helix is a specialist solution that helps organisations build stronger skills. Together, they support both productivity and continuous development.

Helix vs Microsoft Copilot: Final comparison

Frequently asked questions

Build a smarter approach to skills development

In 2026, organisations aren’t just choosing AI tools that help them work faster or produce more. The best AI tools for learning are those that help the workforce develop and grow, without requiring lots of time away from their day-to-day roles.

Helix gives organisations continuous visibility into workforce capability, identifies opportunities for development and connects those insights with personalised AI coaching through VeeCoach. Combined with seamless integration into your existing LMS or learning platform, it enables continuous skills development without requiring you to replace your current technology stack or commit to a single vendor ecosystem.

Whether or not you’re already using Microsoft Copilot, Helix is a highly effective choice for any business looking to better understand the skills of its workforce.