Skills
A skill is a set of reusable instructions the AI can load when it needs them. Where an agent's instructions describe that agent's job, a skill describes how to do one thing well — and any agent or chat can use it.
Skills live under Skills in your organization and are shared across it.
What a skill contains
- Name — lowercase letters, numbers and single hyphens, up to 64 characters, for example
invoice-parser. - Description — one line explaining when this skill should be used. This is what the AI reads when deciding whether the skill is relevant, so make it specific.
- Instructions — the markdown body: the step-by-step guidance to follow when the skill is loaded.
How skills are used
There are two ways a skill gets used:
- Per message — type
/in a chat and pick a skill. It applies to that turn. - Always, for one agent — reference the skill in the agent's
instructions with
/skill-name. It is then available in every chat with that agent.
Only the name and description are loaded up front. The full instructions are fetched when the AI decides the skill applies, so having many skills does not slow anything down or crowd out the conversation.
Why use skills
The point is not to write more instructions but to write them once. A procedure that several agents need — how your invoices are laid out, house style for customer replies, which fields matter in your CRM — belongs in a skill, not copied into each agent's instructions.
Built-in document skills
Some models come with document skills already available: creating and editing Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files, including formulas, formatting and charts.
These appear automatically when the chat's model supports them, and they run in the code execution sandbox, so the agent needs the code execution capability enabled. See agents.