Google drops Gems for Skills, joining OpenAI and Anthropic in the shift to agent-ready prompt formats
Google is replacing Gemini Gems with Anthropic-style Skills prompts and sunsetting Gems through 2027.
Google is rolling out Skills globally in Gemini chat, replacing Gems, its equivalent of Custom GPTs. Skills are reusable task prompts invoked with a slash command; Gemini can draft them from prior chats and chain several together. The format began with Anthropic as an open standard, and OpenAI is also retiring Custom GPTs. Personal Gems end in November, enterprise and nonprofit Workspace accounts in March 2027, and education accounts in June 2027, with automatic conversion. Google's Opal mini-app experiment also ends in November.
- Skills replace Gems in Gemini and follow Anthropic's open prompt format.
- Users invoke Skills with a slash command and can chain them.
- Skills accept text, PDFs, and images; Drive sharing comes later.
- Personal Gems end in November; education accounts last until June 2027.
- Existing Gems convert to Skills automatically.
Full article222 words · extracted from the-decoder.com · click to collapse
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.
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.
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://the-decoder.com/google-drops-gems-for-skills-joining-openai-and-anthropic-in-the-shift-to-agent-ready-prompt-formats/