Gemini skills replace Gems: what changes and what to do

Gemini skills are saved instructions you run in Gemini chat by typing a forward slash and the skill's name. They replace Gems: personal accounts lose Gems in November 2026, when Google converts them to skills automatically, and the Opal mini-app experiment shuts down on November 17.

Google announced all of this on September 30. On X, @GoogleLabs called skills "a faster way to automate repetitive tasks" and said "a bittersweet farewell to Opal." The post tells the backstory, too. Opal was where Google tested how people customize workflows, and what it learned there went into "Gems made by Labs" first and skills after that.

What Gemini skills actually do

Deven Tokuno, a product manager on the Gemini app, wrote the official announcement. The basics:

• Type / in the prompt box to pick a saved skill instead of pasting the same long prompt again.
• Stack several skills in one request.
• Attach reference files to a skill. PDFs, plain text and images work today.
• Link sharing, Google Drive files and Gemini Notebook content are "coming soon."
• Skills are rolling out worldwide in Gemini chat to free and paid users 18 and older. Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit and education customers get them "in the coming weeks."

The Decoder adds that Gemini can build a skill out of an earlier conversation and run one on its own when your prompt matches it. 9to5Google confirms that free users who don't pay for Spark get skills too.

The name isn't new. Anthropic and OpenAI already call their reusable instruction packs "skills," and The Decoder reads Google's switch as joining that format. A skill you write for one assistant should get easier to carry over to another.

The dates for Gems and Opal

Per Google, when Gems go away depends on the account. Personal Google accounts lose them in November 2026. Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit accounts follow in March 2027, and Workspace education in June 2027. In every case, existing Gems convert to skills without you doing anything.

Opal gets no such conversion. Mixed News, citing Google's Opal FAQ, reports that saved Opal workflow files stay in your Google Drive but stop running interactively after November 17. If you built a multi-step Opal app, plan on rebuilding it somewhere.

What skills can't do yet

The same report lists the gaps. Skills don't work with Canvas, Deep Research, video creation, music creation or guided learning yet, and you can keep at most 100 active skills. If one of your Gems depended on Deep Research or Canvas, test the converted version before you rely on it.

My read

I like this change. Most people never opened the submenu where Gems lived. The slash command sits in the same box you already type in, so more people will save prompts instead of retyping them, and dropping the paywall clears the other hurdle.

It's still a small feature, though. A skill is a stored prompt plus some files, and it runs only when someone types the slash. It won't watch your inbox, run on a schedule, or update your CRM. "Automate repetitive tasks" is fair for drafting and summarizing. Work that has to happen whether or not anyone opens Gemini needs a different tool.

What this means for a small business

If your team uses Gems on personal Google accounts, write down which ones you have this month and check each after the November conversion. Workspace customers have until March 2027 to decide which Gems are worth keeping. If you have Opal mini-apps, export the instructions now and pick where they'll live next.

Skills also make a decent first step for a team. Writing the prompt for "reply to a quote request in our voice" or "summarize this job file" makes you spell out the process, and you need that spelled out before you can automate it properly. If you want help sorting which steps should stay a skill and which deserve a real automation, New Face Design's free process audit goes through your week and sorts them out.