Skip to main content
A skill is a set of instructions that shapes how a coworker approaches a specific kind of task — think of it as a colleague’s specialized training, applied automatically whenever it’s relevant. You don’t turn skills on, pick them from a menu, or mention them in a request. A coworker just has them, the same way a real colleague who’s good at Excel doesn’t announce it before opening a spreadsheet.

​
Why this page matters

If you’ve ever wondered “can Hannah actually do keyword research, or do I need a separate SEO tool?” or “does Elena really understand how our project is structured, or is she just guessing?” — the answer is in what skill is quietly running behind the scenes. Skills are the difference between a generic chatbot that can talk about anything in general terms, and a coworker that handles a specific kind of work the way someone who’s actually done it before would.

​
How discovery actually works

Every skill is a short brief — a description of when it applies and how to approach that kind of work. When you send a request, a coworker reads it, recognizes which of its skills actually match, and applies the relevant one automatically, silently, in the background. A concrete example: you email Hannah, “can you check what people are actually searching for around our new product before we finalize the launch copy?” You never said the words “SEO” or “keyword research.” Hannah recognizes that this calls for her SEO/keyword-research skill and just does it — the skill shapes how she approaches the question (which data to pull, how to structure the findings), but you experience it as simply getting a good answer, not as “invoking a tool.”

​
The three tiers

Built-in skills

A curated library that ships with every coworker — document creation, research, strategy, and more. Nothing to set up.

Premium skills

Specialized, higher-depth capabilities for a specific recurring need — some already active by default, others still rolling out.

Custom skills

A process specific to your team, written down once so every coworker follows it after — your house style, captured permanently.

​
What skills are not

A skill isn’t a plugin you install or a setting you toggle, and it isn’t the same thing as Memory — a skill is how a coworker approaches a kind of task; memory is what it knows about you specifically. They work together: a skill might shape how Hannah structures a competitor report, while memory is what tells her which competitors you actually care about.

​
How this connects

Built-in skills are what make each coworker distinct from a generic assistant — Hannah’s research methodology, Elena’s project-tracking discipline, Alex’s document creation are all skills under the hood. Integrations feed skills real data to work with; Memory gives them your specific context. Premium skills are billed like any other work — see Credits & Billing.
You don’t need to do anything to benefit from built-in skills — start with the Quickstart and a coworker will already be drawing on the right ones. Premium and custom skills are both opt-in, for when you need something more specialized than the built-in library covers.