Google drops Gems for Skills, joining OpenAI and Anthropic in the shift to agent-ready prompt formats
Google is rolling out "Skills" globally in Gemini chat. Skills are detailed prompts for specific tasks that the AI can help write and refine. They replace Gems, Google's equivalent of OpenAI's Custom GPTs, which OpenAI is also sunsetting. The Skills format originated with Anthropic and is available as an open standard .
Users save frequent instructions as a Skill and invoke them by typing "/" plus the Skill name. Gemini can also generate Skills from previous chats and run them automatically when it detects a matching prompt. Multiple Skills can be chained for bigger tasks like combining writing style with brand guidelines, Google says.
Skills now support text documents, PDFs, and images as reference material. Google will add sharing, Google Drive files, and Gemini Notebook integration in the coming weeks, followed by a launch for enterprise, education, and nonprofit Workspace customers. Ad
Gems shut down in November for personal accounts, March 2027 for enterprise and nonprofit Workspace customers, and June 2027 for education customers. Existing Gems convert to Skills automatically. November also ends Opal , Google's AI mini-app experiment from summer 2025. Ad
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