Google drops Gems for Skills, joining OpenAI and Anthropic on agent-ready prompts

Google has begun rolling out "Skills" globally in Gemini chat. The feature turns detailed, reusable instructions for specific tasks into saved objects that can be called up on demand, and it replaces Gems, the assistant's earlier equivalent of OpenAI's Custom GPTs.

What Skills do

According to Google, Skills are detailed prompts for particular tasks that the AI can help write and refine. A user saves a frequent instruction as a Skill and invokes it by typing "/" followed by the Skill's name. Gemini can also generate Skills from earlier chats and run them automatically when it recognizes a matching prompt.

Several Skills can be chained for larger jobs, the company says, for example combining a preferred writing style with a set of brand guidelines. Skills now accept text documents, PDFs and images as reference material. Google plans to add sharing, Google Drive files and Gemini Notebook integration in the coming weeks.

A format that came from Anthropic

The Skills format did not start at Google. It originated with Anthropic and was published as an open standard so other AI platforms can adopt it. Google now joins OpenAI and Anthropic, which have been steering their assistants toward prompt formats built for agents rather than one-off conversations.

The change also marks the end of Gems. Google says existing Gems will be migrated into Skills automatically. Gems shut down in November for personal accounts, in March 2027 for enterprise and nonprofit Workspace customers, and in June 2027 for education customers. November also ends Opal, Google's AI mini-app experiment from summer 2025.

Rollout to Workspace

The chat rollout is global, while Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit and education customers will receive Skills in the coming weeks, Google says.