Feb 6, 2026

What Are Skills? How to Teach Your AI Assistant to Work the Way You Do

AI assistants are great at general tasks. But they don’t know your way of doing things — your follow-up email style, your meeting agenda format, your sales outreach template. So you re-explain it every time.

A skill is a set of plain-English instructions you write once that teaches your AI how to handle a specific task, your way. Think of it like training a new hire: explain the process once, write it down, and they follow it every time after that.

Skills are reusable (write once, the AI follows forever), shareable (give one to your team and every AI assistant works the same way), and portable (a skill you create for one AI tool works across others too — more on that below).

The Surprising Part: Everyone Agreed on a Standard

In December 2025, Anthropic (the company behind Claude) released the Agent Skills specification as an open standard. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and more than 20 other companies adopted it.

That means a skill you create for one AI tool works in all of them — like USB for AI customization. VentureBeat called it Anthropic’s challenge to OpenAI in workplace AI, but the real story is the interoperability.

How Skills Work

Here’s a real example. Say you’re a recruiter, and every time a candidate asks about your parental leave policy, you want your AI to give the same accurate answer. Your skill might look like this:

Skill: Parental Leave Policy

When a candidate asks about parental leave, respond with the following details:

We offer 16 weeks paid leave for all new parents

Leave can be taken any time in the first year

Part-time return options are available

Include a warm, encouraging tone

That’s it. Your AI now handles this question consistently, every time.

Different Scopes for Different Needs

Level	Who gets it	Example
Personal	Just you, across all your tools	Your preferred email sign-off style
Team/Project	Everyone working on the same project	How your team formats client proposals
Company-wide	Everyone in your organization	Brand voice guidelines, compliance rules

Skills can also include reference material — a brand guide, product FAQ, pricing sheet — that the AI loads on demand.

Some skills run in the background (your brand voice, your meeting notes format) and apply automatically. Others are on-demand actions you trigger: “prep me for a sales call,” “draft an outreach email,” “write a weekly report.”

Where Skills Work

Claude shipped skills first — they’re built into Claude.ai with partner integrations from Notion, Figma, Canva, Stripe, and more. OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and 25+ other tools all support the same format.

OpenClaw — the open-source AI assistant that hit 150,000 users in three weeks — has its own skills marketplace called ClawHub, with everything from flight check-in automations to smart home controls.

Carly uses Skills to let you customize how she handles your calendar, email, and CRM. A founder might write: “When an email mentions a funding round, save the details to the contact’s record.” A sales rep might add: “After every meeting, update the contact’s notes.” No code — just instructions in your own words.

Popular Skills People Are Using

For Content Creators & Writers

Skill	What it does
Humanizer	Strips out robotic AI-writing patterns (“delve,” “it’s worth noting,” etc.) so your content sounds like a real person wrote it
SEO Optimizer	Analyzes your content, finds the right keywords, and generates an optimized version that ranks better in search
Voice Skills	Maintains different writing voices for different audiences — one for social media, one for client emails, one for internal updates — so your tone never gets mixed up
YouTube Toolkit	Pulls transcripts from YouTube videos so you can repurpose video content into blog posts, newsletters, or social media

For Business & Marketing

Skill	What it does
Marketing Skills	A collection of skills for copywriting, conversion optimization, SEO audits, and growth strategy
Business Case Builder	Walks you through building an investment case step by step, with templates for quick pitches or comprehensive proposals
Meeting Analyzer	Reviews meeting transcripts and pulls out action items, key decisions, and things that need follow-up
Brand Onboarding	Packages your brand’s voice, tone, and visual guidelines into a skill you can share with freelancers and agencies
Inventory Analyst	Forecasts 12 months of sales from your historical data and recommends when to reorder stock

For Personal Productivity

Skill	What it does
Job Description Analyzer	Compares job postings against your resume and tells you how good a fit you are, with suggestions for your application
The Self-Interview	Asks you progressively deeper questions about your projects or ideas — like having a thought partner who knows exactly what to ask
Last 30 Days	Searches social media and the web for what’s been trending in the last month — great for staying informed or planning content
Obsidian Skills	Connects your AI assistant to your Obsidian notes, so it can read your personal knowledge base and help you build on it

For Research & Science

Skill	What it does
Scientific Skills	140+ integrations for scientific research — search medical literature, analyze chemical compounds, review clinical data

Want to explore more? SkillsMP has indexed over 145,000 skills from across the community, and awesome-agent-skills curates the best 200+.

Why This Matters

Even if you never create a skill yourself, they change how AI works for you. Skills your company sets up mean new hires get an AI that already knows how things are done. Institutional knowledge lives in skills instead of walking out the door when people leave. And because every major AI company adopted the same standard, you’re not locked in — switch from Claude to ChatGPT and your customizations come with you.

Want to try skills yourself? Carly lets you teach your AI assistant how you work — calendar, email, CRM, all in plain English. Get started →