One of the biggest challenges with using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is that you don’t know the inner workings. You have a vague idea of what the result is going to look like, based on your instructions, but no idea how the AI chatbot mustered it. And as you go from single to multi-step tasks, the situation gets trickier. This is where Skills come into the picture.
What’s the big shift
Think of skills as a set of instructions that can be executed, or applied, with a single word. Claude-maker Anthropic recently introduced Agent skills, an open standard tool that tells an AI agent to perform a specific task using natural language descriptions.
Interestingly, OpenAI added support for Agent Skills in ChatGPT Codex. And as per AIRPM engineer and code sleuth Tibor Blaho, agentic skills will soon be available in ChatGPT, as well. He furthcuer added that OpenAI could also offer “an option to convert a custom GPT into a skill.” This would be a huge step forward.
Skills are not a new concept. Custom GPTs for ChatGPT serve a similar purpose, and so do Gems for Gemini. Even AI browsers like Dia let you create skills, while Perplexity’s Comet browser embraces the same ideas as shortcuts.
But why skills?
Skills don’t require any technical or coding knowledge to create. You can use natural language prompts to create them and pick a name for them, as well. For my work, I have created one called “research.” And this was the whole instruction that I used:
“When a phrase or term is given, look it up in peer-reviewed journals and science publications, find the most cited papers, and summarize the core findings as bullet points.” You can take a look at how the skills builder works in the Dia browser.
So, the next time I want to research a topic, I can summon the skill by name and follow up with the query, instead of writing a detailed prompt every single time. With a skill ready, I can simply go ahead with a short command like “/research Manhattan Project” and I will get my answer, in just the exact way I want.
But there is another huge benefit of the Agent Skills platform headed to ChatGPT. They are an open-standard, which means these skills will work just as fine across other AI chatbots such as Claude, Copilot and Gemini, as they do with ChatGPT.