Simon Carter
Workplace AI

Google Skills start rolling out to Workspace: and the first breaking change is already here

Skills begin replacing Gems in Google Workspace from 5 October 2026. Admins can no longer add 'Ask a Gem' steps in Workspace Studio.

Gemini working as an intelligent orchestrator across Google Workspace apps, illustrating the Skills feature announcement

Google’s Gems, the custom AI assistants you could build inside Gemini, are being retired. Their replacement is called Skills, and the migration is now underway. From 5 October 2026, Skills have begun rolling out to Rapid Release Workspace domains, with that rollout expected to complete by 12 October 2026. Scheduled Release domains follow from 19 October 2026, completing by mid-November.

This is not a distant roadmap item. One concrete change is already in effect, and if your organisation uses Google Workspace Studio, you need to know about it now.

What changed on 5 October 2026

From 5 October 2026, nobody in your organisation can add a new “Ask a Gem” step to a Workspace Studio flow. The option is simply gone. Existing flows that already contain an “Ask a Gem” step will continue to work for now, but they will stop working entirely no earlier than 1 March 2027, when Gems are fully retired for business and enterprise users.

This is the first breaking change in the Gems-to-Skills migration. If your team has built automated workflows in Workspace Studio that rely on Gems, the clock is running.

What Skills actually are

Where Gems were essentially full custom AI assistants, Skills are more focused. A Skill is a reusable set of instructions that you apply to a prompt, rather than a separate assistant you switch into. Think of it as a modifier rather than a persona.

You might create a “Brand Voice” skill that applies your company’s tone guidelines whenever you are drafting content in Docs, or a “Proposal Architect” skill that structures responses in a specific format. Once created, you invoke a skill by typing / followed by the skill name in the prompt bar. Google is moving this to @ followed by the skill name in the near future.

The stackable nature is genuinely useful. You can apply multiple skills to the same prompt at the same time, combining, for example, a writing style skill with a brand guidelines skill to produce content that hits both targets in one go. Gems could not do this.

The open standard underneath

Skills use a Markdown-based format called SKILL.md, which is an open standard originally developed by Anthropic and now published at agentskills.io. Google’s skill builder accepts SKILL.md files created in other platforms, which means a skill you build for Claude could, in principle, be imported into Gemini. That cross-platform portability is a meaningful shift from the proprietary Gems format.

Worth noting: skills do not currently sync between the Gemini app and Workspace apps. If you want the same skill available in both places, you will need to create it separately in each.

Where Skills work in Workspace

Once available in your domain, Skills can be used in the Gemini side panel inside Gmail, Docs, Slides, and Drive, as well as in Ask Gemini in Google Chat. They can also be connected to Workspace Studio flows, which is the direct replacement for the now-blocked “Ask a Gem” step.

There are some limitations to be aware of. GitHub files are not supported. Skills do not yet work with Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning, or the Create video and Create music features. File uploads are supported (plain text, PDFs, and images) with a 100 MB total limit per skill.

The full retirement timeline

Google has published firm dates for the wind-down of Gems:

  • From 5 October 2026: No new “Ask a Gem” steps can be added in Workspace Studio.
  • November 2026: Personal-account Gems are removed. Gems by Google Labs and Opal (Google’s mini-app experiment) are also shut down and will not migrate to Skills.
  • No earlier than 1 March 2027: Business and enterprise users lose the ability to create, edit, or use Gems. Existing Workspace Studio flows using “Ask a Gem” stop working. Any Gems remaining in the Gemini app are automatically migrated to draft Skills.
  • No earlier than 1 June 2027: Education users lose access to Gems, including within Google Classroom and any third-party LMS integrations supported by Gemini LTI.

The Gemini app rollout of Skills (for business users) begins 13 October 2026, completing by mid-November.

What this means for admins

Google’s own recommendation is to rebuild business-critical Gems manually as Skills before the deadline, rather than relying on the automatic migration. The auto-migration will create draft Skills from your remaining Gems, but a draft is not a tested, production-ready tool.

Practically, that means auditing which Gems your users actually rely on, prioritising the ones embedded in Workspace Studio flows (since those break first), and starting the rebuild process now. Google recommends communicating the key dates to users, particularly the 1 March 2027 deadline for business and enterprise accounts.

Skills in Workspace are available to Business Starter, Standard, and Plus; Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus; and the Google AI Pro for Education add-on. Users must be 18 or older to use Skills in Workspace. Skills in the Gemini app will be available to users of all ages once that rollout completes.

If your domain is on Rapid Release, Skills should be visible to your users between 5 and 12 October 2026. If you are on Scheduled Release, expect them from 19 October 2026 onward.