>_ The Manifest

Most enterprise questions aren’t about documents: they’re about people. Who owns this process, who should I loop in, what has my team been working on? The People capability for declarative agents surfaces that organizational intelligence, and it’s the simplest capability you’ll ever configure.

What Is the People Capability?

The People capability gives your declarative agent access to the organizational graph that already exists across Microsoft 365: org charts, colleague profiles, skills, and expertise. It turns your agent into something that understands who your organization is, not just what it knows.

By default, the agent can answer people-centric questions by drawing on:

  • Org chart and directory: reporting lines, job titles, departments, office locations
  • Contact information: email addresses, phone numbers, office details
  • Skills and expertise: profile information, topics people work on, areas of knowledge

With include_related_content set to true, the agent also surfaces:

  • Collaboration signals: related emails, Teams messages, and shared documents between you and the referenced person
  • Shared work: documents co-authored, files exchanged, recent collaborative activity

All of this comes from first-party Microsoft 365 data. No external connectors, no API configuration, no data pipelines.

📝 Note

The People capability draws exclusively from Microsoft 365 first-party data: Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft Entra ID. It surfaces the organizational intelligence that already lives inside M365 without any admin setup or external configuration.

Enabling People in Your Agent

This is the entire configuration:

{
  "name": "People"
}

No connections, no URLs, no file references. Just the name. To also surface related emails, Teams messages, and shared documents between the user and referenced colleagues, add include_related_content:

{
  "name": "People",
  "include_related_content": true
}

Here’s how it fits into a full manifest alongside other capabilities:

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/copilot/declarative-agent/v1.6/schema.json",
  "version": "v1.6",
  "name": "HR Onboarding Buddy",
  "description": "A friendly assistant to help new employees at Zava Insurance.",
  "instructions": "$[file('instructions.txt')]",
  "capabilities": [
    {
      "name": "OneDriveAndSharePoint",
      "items_by_url": [
        {
          "url": "https://zavainsurance.sharepoint.com/sites/HR/Shared Documents/Onboarding"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "People"
    },
    {
      "name": "CodeInterpreter"
    }
  ]
}

SharePoint for document grounding, People for organizational intelligence, Code Interpreter for calculations. Each capability handles a different class of question, and the orchestrator routes automatically.

💡 Tip

Add guidance in your agent’s instructions like: “When employees ask about colleagues, team structure, or who to contact, use the People capability to provide accurate organizational context. Always include the person’s role and department.” This steers the agent toward using People data purposefully.

Use Cases: People Intelligence at Zava Insurance

The People capability turns the HR Onboarding Buddy from a document lookup tool into a genuine organizational guide.

Finding the Right Person

A new hire on their first week asks:

HR Onboarding Buddy

Who should I talk to about benefits enrollment?

For benefits enrollment, reach out to Maria Santos, Benefits Administrator in the HR team. She reports to David Park, VP of People Operations. Maria handles all new hire benefits questions and enrollment processing.

Structured, actionable, grounded in real directory data.

Understanding Team Activity

With include_related_content enabled, a manager can ask:

HR Onboarding Buddy

What has Sarah been working on this quarter?

Sarah Chen has been active on the Q2 Platform Roadmap document, has been collaborating with the Infrastructure team on the cloud migration project, and co-authored the API Gateway proposal with James Liu last month.

Collaboration Context

A team lead preparing for a project handoff asks:

HR Onboarding Buddy

What have I been working on with Tom Rivera recently?

You and Tom Rivera have exchanged 14 emails this month, mostly around the API Gateway proposal. You co-edited the deployment spec last week and have both been active in the #platform-migration Teams channel. The most recent shared document is the Migration Checklist, updated two days ago.

Privacy and the Permission Model

People intelligence sounds powerful: and it raises an obvious question: what can the agent actually see?

The answer: only what the user can already see. The People capability operates within the same permission boundaries as Microsoft 365 itself:

  • The agent accesses org chart data visible to the signed-in user
  • Profile information comes from the user’s profile card data
  • When include_related_content is enabled, email, Teams, and document signals are scoped to content the user already has access to
  • No admin data, no HR-only records, no cross-boundary access

There’s no surprise data exposure. If an employee can’t see their CEO’s calendar details in Outlook, the agent can’t surface them either.

ℹ️ Info

The People capability respects Microsoft 365 information barriers and tenant-level privacy settings. Organizations with strict data isolation policies can enable People without worrying about cross-boundary leakage.

What This Capability Gives Your Agent

A single capability declaration (or two lines with include_related_content) gave us:

  • Organizational awareness: The agent understands reporting lines, departments, roles, and office locations without any directory integration work
  • Expert discovery: Users can find the right person for any topic based on profile skills, expertise, and organizational context
  • Collaboration intelligence: With include_related_content enabled, the agent surfaces shared documents, email threads, and Teams messages between colleagues
  • Zero configuration: No connections to set up, no URLs to specify, no admin involvement required
  • Privacy by design: Every response is scoped to what the signed-in user can already access, respecting information barriers and tenant-level privacy settings

The HR Onboarding Buddy now answers “who” questions with the same confidence it answers “what” questions, turning organizational knowledge into something every employee can tap into with a single prompt.

Resources

Have questions or want to share what you're building? Connect with me on LinkedIn or check out more on The Manifest.