Google is rolling out Skills globally in Gemini chat to replace Gems, joining OpenAI and Anthropic in the industry shift toward agent-ready prompt formats. Skills function as detailed prompts for specific tasks that the artificial intelligence can help write and refine, adopting the open standard format that originally came from Anthropic. Users can save frequent instructions as a Skill and invoke them simply by typing a forward slash plus the Skill name, while Gemini can also generate Skills from previous chats and run them automatically when it detects a matching prompt.
The updated prompt format allows users to chain multiple Skills together for larger tasks, such as combining a specific writing style with brand guidelines. Skills currently support text documents, PDFs, and images as reference material, and Google plans to introduce sharing capabilities, Google Drive files, and Gemini Notebook integration in the coming weeks. Existing Gems will convert automatically to Skills before their final phase-out dates, which are set for November for personal accounts, March 2027 for enterprise and nonprofit Workspace customers, and June 2027 for education customers, alongside the conclusion of Google's Opal AI mini-app experiment.
This transition aligns Google with OpenAI and Anthropic in adopting standardized, agent-ready prompt structures for customized AI workflows.