What is a skill?
November 2026
The short answer
A skill is a saved set of instructions, examples and files that tells an AI assistant how your business does one particular task. Write it once, and every person and every agent uses it the same way.
Why it matters
Without a skill, everyone writes their own prompt every time, and you get a different answer from each person. With one, the quote, the complaint reply or the site report comes out your way, every time.
All the big assistants now work this way. Claude carries skills across chat and Cowork. Copilot Chat lets anyone create a skill in plain language. Google is replacing Gems with skills in Gemini.
What goes in a skill
- What the task is and when to use it.
- What good looks like, with one or two real examples.
- Your rules: tone, pricing, terms, what never to say.
- The common mistakes, and how to avoid them.
- Any files it needs, like your template or price list.
How to write your first three
Pick three tasks your team does every week that follow roughly the same steps. Sit with the person who does each one best and write it down the way they would explain it to a capable new starter. Test it on last week’s real work and fix what comes out wrong.
Give each skill an owner and review it when the process changes. A skill nobody owns goes stale, and a stale skill is worse than none.
Keep the master copy in your own documents, not only inside one tool. You will probably use more than one assistant over the next few years, and Google’s skills do not even sync between its own apps yet.