Google began rolling out a new feature called Skills inside the Gemini app worldwide on September 30, 2026, at around 11pm Thai time, replacing its year-old “Gems” custom-assistant tool. A skill is a reusable instruction a person saves once — a brand voice, a reply template, a checklist — and runs instantly by typing a forward slash and its name, with no extra subscription required.
Reusable, Stackable Instructions
A skill is a saved set of instructions written once and reused repeatedly, and can carry reference files like PDFs or images alongside it, per Google’s announcement. Unlike a single Gem, several skills can run together in one conversation — pairing a “brand voice” skill with a “weekly report” skill, for instance. Google’s support documentation says a user can create as many skills as they want, but only 100 can be active on an account at a time.
Who Can Use It, and What Happens to Gems
Skills are live now for anyone 18 or older signed into a personal Google account, on every Google AI plan including the free tier; access for under-18 users is “coming soon,” Google says, and Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit and education accounts get the feature “in the coming weeks.” Gems keep working until Google removes them — starting November 2026 for personal accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit customers, and June 2027 for Workspace education accounts. Existing Gems migrate into skills automatically when that happens, or a user can recreate one manually before then.
What Support Teams Can Do Now
- Check whether the Gemini account your team uses is a personal account with an adult signed in — a company Workspace login won’t see skills yet, since that rollout hasn’t started.
- If staff already lean on a Gemini Gem for drafting replies or summarizing tickets, it keeps working for now, but try rebuilding it as a skill today to test stacking it with a separate “brand tone” skill before the automatic migration in November.
- A general assistant like Gemini still doesn’t know a business’s own products, policies or order history — that gap is what a support AI trained on the business’s own knowledge base, like 1CS’s AI Agents, is built to close.
This follows Anthropic moving its free tier onto Sonnet 5.5 and OpenAI’s 50% price cut on GPT-6 Sol and Luna days earlier — AI vendors are racing to add capability and cut cost at the same time.
