Google Is Swapping Gems for Skills. Here Is the Move, in Order.
If your team built Gems in Gemini, they have until March 1, 2027. A calm afternoon now beats a scramble later.
By John Martines · October 9, 2026 · 6 min
Google started rolling out Skills in Workspace on October 5 and says they will replace Gems. Here is what changes, the dates that matter for a business account, and a short plan to move your best Gems over.
Your office manager opens Gemini in Gmail on a Monday and types a slash. A small menu pops up that wasn't there last week. In it: "Skills."
She has used the same Gem for a year to write replies to customer complaints. It knows your tone, your refund policy, and the one phrase the owner hates. She wonders if it still works, whether it moved, and whether she should do anything.
Yes, it still works, for now. And yes, someone should do something, but not in a hurry.
A Gem is a saved set of instructions in Google's Gemini assistant. You write "you are our customer-reply helper, here is our tone, here is our policy" once, and then use it again and again instead of pasting the same paragraph into every chat.
A Skill does the same job, with three differences that matter to a business.
It works where you work. Skills run inside most Workspace apps, including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and Chat, not only in the separate Gemini app. You type a slash (/) in the prompt box and pick one from the list.
You can stack them. You can use more than one at a time. A "brand voice" skill plus a "quote format" skill in the same request, for example.
It is a plain file, built on an open standard. Google says Skills are built on SKILL.md, a simple text format that other AI tools also read. Google says this lets you copy skills you made elsewhere into Gemini. In plain terms, your instructions are no longer locked inside one product.
Google also says skills can carry reference files (text, PDFs and images), that Gemini can build a skill from a chat you already had, and that a skill can kick in on its own when your request matches it.
How it got here:
- August 28, 2024: Google launched Gems for Gemini Advanced, Business and Enterprise subscribers.
- December 18, 2025: the SKILL.md format, first built by Anthropic for its Claude tools, was published as an open standard. Other AI tools adopted it soon after.
- September 30, 2026: Google announced Skills in the Gemini app and Workspace, and a timeline for retiring Gems.
- October 5, 2026: Skills began reaching Workspace domains on the Rapid Release schedule, finishing by October 12.
- October 13, 2026: Skills start in the Gemini app.
- October 19, 2026: Skills start for Workspace domains on the Scheduled Release schedule (most businesses), finishing by mid-November.
- November 17, 2026: Gems move into the Settings panel of the Gemini app. You can still create, edit and use them.
- March 1, 2027: on business and enterprise accounts, Gems can no longer be created, edited or used. Workspace Studio flows with an "Ask a Gem" step stop working. Gems still in the Gemini app become draft skills automatically.
Most small businesses that use Gemini have a handful of Gems doing quiet, useful work: a customer reply helper, a proposal starter, a meeting-notes format, a job-post writer. Nobody thinks about them until they break.
Three things are worth knowing.
The automatic move is a draft, not a finished job. Google says leftover Gems become "draft skills" in the Gemini app on March 1. A draft is not the same as tested. And skills do not sync between the Gemini app and the Workspace apps, so a skill made in one place has to be made again in the other.
Automations can stop quietly. If anyone built a Workspace Studio flow with an "Ask a Gem" step, that flow stops working on March 1, 2027. You can no longer add new "Ask a Gem" steps now. Flows don't announce that they have stopped; work just stops arriving.
It is a chance to clean up. Gems pile up. Some were one person's experiment. Some hold old prices or an old policy. Moving to Skills is a natural moment to keep the five that matter and let the rest go.
A free account opens the rest of this article and the whole library.