On September 30, 2026, Google announced on its official blog that Skills are rolling out directly into Gemini chat globally. Skills are reusable custom instructions you save once and invoke again and again from the prompt bar, and they are replacing Gems as the way to tailor Gemini for specific tasks. According to Deven Tokuno, Senior Product Manager for the Gemini App, Skills are already available in Gemini Spark, and the same functionality is coming to Google Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit, and education customers in the coming weeks.
For current plans, prices and every Maitz article on Gemini, see our Gemini hub.
The idea behind Skills is straightforward. Instead of pasting the same long prompt every time, you create a skill once and call it when you need it. After a skill exists, you type a forward slash and the skill name in the prompt bar, and Gemini runs the saved instructions. That lets you skip the repetitive prompting and jump straight to the result.
What you can do with Skills
Google highlights a few everyday uses. You can build a skill that prepares presentations: outlining slides, drafting talking points, and getting ready for tough Q&As, whether for a class or a project pitch. You can match a writing style so Gemini knows your voice across Workspace apps and speeds up drafting while you stay in control of the wording. And you can ask it to always offer several distinct viewpoints on a topic, to refine an argument or settle on a decision.
Beyond that, Gemini can help you build custom skills from existing chats and automatically run them when you enter a matching prompt. For larger jobs you can stack multiple skills at the same time, for example a writing-style skill with a brand-guidelines skill, to get on-brand assets in your voice. Starting on the day of the announcement, skills can also include reference files such as plain text documents, PDFs, or images.
Moving on from Gems, and what happens to Opal
Google says that in the coming weeks Skills will gain capabilities people liked in Gems, including sharing with others and adding files from Google Drive and notebooks from Gemini Notebook. At the same time, support for Gems will be removed on a staggered schedule: starting in November for personal accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business, enterprise, and nonprofit customers, and June 2027 for Workspace education customers. When Gems go away, Google will automatically migrate them into skills. More detail on the transition is in Google’s help center.
Alongside Gems, Opal, a Labs experiment for building mini apps, will also turn down at the same time in November. Gems by Google Labs will turn down as well, but unlike regular Gems they will not migrate into skills.
Who gets access
According to the post, Skills are available to all Google AI subscription tiers. They are currently available to users 18 and older, with U18 access coming soon. The Gemini chat rollout is described as global, and the Workspace expansion is planned for the coming weeks, without a more precise date in the official announcement.
The move sits alongside other recent Google updates around Gemini, including the Gemini 4 Argon reveal and Guided Vision in Gemini Live. More Google and AI coverage is in AI News.
Sources
- Google, official blog: Let skills in Gemini tackle your most repetitive tasks (September 30, 2026), by Deven Tokuno, blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/automate-tasks-with-skills
