Google replaces Gemini Gems with Skills feature in November

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Sep 30, 2026, 18:20 UTC

Google announced on September 28, 2026 that it will retire Gems, the custom AI assistant feature inside its Gemini app, and replace it with a new system called Skills starting sometime in November 2026. Skills function as detailed, reusable prompts that users can call up by typing a forward slash or that Gemini can activate automatically based on context. Google confirmed that existing Gems will migrate to the Skills format automatically, meaning users will not need to rebuild their configurations from scratch. No precise date within November has been given for the cutover.

The more significant element of the announcement is the underlying standard Skills are built on. Google is adopting an open format originally developed by Anthropic, and the same standard has been taken up by OpenAI, which means three of the largest players in consumer AI are now aligning around a shared prompt architecture. That kind of convergence can accelerate third-party tooling and interoperability, but it also raises questions about whether any single company can meaningfully differentiate its assistant product when the building blocks are shared. The Gems-to-Skills shift also comes as all-in-one AI agents, including Meta's Muse and Instinct, have gained adoption, a pressure TechCrunch noted as context for why Google is moving away from task-specific custom agents toward a more flexible, slash-command model.

The pro-AI camp has not yet published reactions to this story. That camp would typically frame a move like this as a positive sign of ecosystem maturity, pointing to open standards as evidence that AI tooling is becoming more interoperable and user-friendly rather than locked inside proprietary walled gardens. The anti-AI camp is represented here by a comment from hugbee.bsky.social, who described Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon and similar companies as primarily rent-seeker businesses, a framing that treats the feature change as less about genuine innovation and more about controlling the infrastructure users depend on. The middle ground camp has not published reactions either; that camp would typically ask practical questions about whether the migration preserves functionality and whether an open standard actually produces better outcomes for users or mainly benefits the platforms that define it.

The clearest thing to watch is the November 2026 rollout itself, specifically whether the automatic migration preserves existing Gem behavior without loss of functionality and whether Google publishes more detail about how the Anthropic-originated standard will be governed and extended over time.