Gemini swaps Gems for skills you summon with a slash

Google is replacing Gemini's Gems with skills: saved sets of custom instructions that do the same job, but can be summoned from the prompt bar by typing a forward slash and the skill's name.

The change was announced on 30 September 2026. Skills are already live in Gemini Spark and are now rolling out in Gemini chat globally, with Google Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit and education customers following in the coming weeks.

Write it once, run it with a slash

The idea is to remove the repetitive prompting that creeps into regular work. A skill holds the instructions you would otherwise retype, so a request for three to five distinct viewpoints on a topic, or a summary written to your own house style, becomes a single shorthand command.

Skills can be built from an existing chat, and Gemini can run one automatically when it recognises a matching prompt. For larger jobs several skills can be stacked at once, such as pairing a writing-style skill with a brand-voice one, and reference files can be attached to make the output more specific.

Gems are being folded in

Google is clear that skills inherit the features people liked about Gems. Sharing arrives in the coming weeks, along with the ability to pull in files from Google Drive and notebooks from Gemini Notebook. As that functionality lands, support for Gems is being removed and existing Gems will be migrated into skills automatically.

That migration is the part worth watching. Custom instructions carry context about how someone works, and a change of container is exactly when saved configurations tend to go missing or arrive without their attachments intact.

Our opinion

Reusable prompts are the least glamorous and most useful feature in consumer AI. Most people are not crafting novel requests; they are asking for the same handful of jobs over and over, and a slash command is a much shorter path to that than re-describing the task every morning.

The catch is that Gemini's saved instructions have now changed name and shape twice, and switching costs fall hardest on the users who invested most in the old version. Google promising automatic migration is the right call, but it has to actually be seamless, because a Gems library that arrives incomplete is worse than one that was never promised.