Google Gemini’s Custom ‘Gems’ Are Being Replaced With ‘Skills’

Google is planning to soon replace Gemini ‘Gems’, the custom versions of its Gemini chatbot it introduced back in 2024, with the more recent Gemini skills system. Skills can be created to automate various tasks and workflows, and they can also work in the background.

9to5Google reported over the weekend that the Gems manager, available from this page, now displays the following message: “Starting November 17, 2026, we’ll automatically begin migrating your Gems to skills. You will be able to use your Gems until they migrate.”

Google offered a selection of premade Gems such as a “Learning Coach” and “Brainstormer” that Gemini users could further customize instead of starting from scratch. Just like OpenAI’s custom GPTs, Gemini Gems can be configured to provide a specific style of responses, and users can also add files for their Gems to reference.

Gemini skills work a bit differently: They’re reusable instructions that can be invoked by typing / in a Gemini chat, and Gemini can also automatically use them when the chatbot judges that they’re relevant to the current prompt. Gemini users can also combine multiple skills in a single prompt, and skills also work with data from Google Workspace apps.

While Google will automatically transition users’ existing Gems to skills when Gems are retired in November, Gemini users can get started early and manually recreate their Gems as skills. Google shared more details about how to do that on a support page.

“In the coming weeks, skills will have the features you loved in Gems, including the ability to share them with others and add files from Google Drive and notebooks from Gemini Notebook. You can already upload complex skills that include text files, PDFs, and images today,” the company explained.