If you use Gemini at work, you may have seen a banner warning that Gems are going away. The common reaction is mild panic: will the custom assistant your team spent weeks tuning disappear on Monday? It will not. Gems are being replaced, slowly, by something called skills, and for most small businesses the change is an upgrade.
Google confirmed the timetable on 30 September 2026, and the first rollout began today, 5 October, for Google Workspace business accounts. This guide explains what a skill is, how it differs from a Gem, which dates matter for a Hong Kong company, and how to write your first one in about fifteen minutes.
What are Gemini skills?
Gemini skills are saved, reusable instructions that tell Google's Gemini AI how to do one specific task your way. You write the instructions once, give them a name, and call them up whenever you need that task done, in the Gemini app or inside Workspace apps such as Docs and Gmail.
Think of a skill as a laminated instruction card you hand to a new staff member. "When you write a quotation reply, keep it under 150 words, quote in HKD, mention the 14-day validity and sign off with the sales hotline." Instead of typing that every time, you save it once as a skill.
Google describes skills as "reusable prompts that guide Gemini". Its own examples include a brand-voice skill for drafting blog posts and a "vendor evaluator" skill for comparing suppliers.
How are skills different from Gems?
A Gem was a separate custom chatbot you had to open on its own. A skill works inside the normal Gemini conversation, and you can stack several skills in one request. Skills also use an open file format, so instructions written for other AI tools can be copied in.
The practical differences come down to three points.
--- One Gem at a time versus many skills at once. With Gems, you picked one assistant and stayed in its chat window. With skills, you can combine a "supplier comparison" skill with an "email in our house style" skill in a single prompt. Google's example pairs a vendor evaluator with an executive email drafter to analyse vendors and write the recommendation in one step.
--- Separate window versus inline. Skills run inside your ordinary chat thread, so you do not need to switch to a different assistant halfway through a task.
--- Closed format versus open format. Skills are built on SKILL.md, an open standard based on Markdown, which is plain text with simple formatting. Google says this lets you copy skills you have created on other platforms into Gemini.
A useful way to picture it: a Gem was like hiring a specialist who only works in their own office. A skill is like giving every staff member a set of procedure cards they can pull out at any desk.
When are Gems being replaced, and what happens to mine?
Skills start rolling out to Workspace on 5 October 2026 and to the Gemini app on 13 October. Gems move into Settings on 17 November and keep working. For business and enterprise accounts, Gems stop working no sooner than 1 March 2027, when leftovers are converted into draft skills automatically.
Here are the dates in order, taken from Google's official Workspace Updates announcement:
--- 5 October 2026: skills begin rolling out in Workspace apps. Companies on the faster "Rapid Release" setting should have them by 12 October. Companies on the default "Scheduled Release" setting start receiving them on 19 October, with completion expected by mid-November.
--- 13 October 2026: skills begin rolling out in the Gemini app, again finishing around mid-November.
--- 17 November 2026: Gems move to the Settings panel of the Gemini app. You can still create, edit and use them.
--- No sooner than 1 March 2027 (business and enterprise accounts): Gems can no longer be created, edited or used. Any Gems still left are automatically turned into draft skills.
--- No sooner than 1 June 2027: the same cut-off for education accounts.
Google says it will tell administrators about the automatic migration at least 30 days in advance. So nothing breaks this month. But the word "draft" matters: an automatically converted skill is a starting point that someone should check, not a finished replacement.
Who can use Gemini skills in Hong Kong?
Any Hong Kong business on a paid Google Workspace plan can use skills inside Workspace apps, and anyone with a Google account can use them in the Gemini app. Gemini itself has been officially available in Hong Kong since March 2026, so no workaround is needed.
According to Google, skills inside Workspace apps are available on these plans:
--- Business: Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus.
--- Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard and Plus.
--- Add-ons: Google AI Pro for Education and AI Expanded Access.
Skills inside Workspace apps are only available to users aged 18 and over. Skills in the Gemini app are open to all Workspace customers and to people using personal Google accounts.
The local context matters. Hong Kong is still not on OpenAI's list of supported regions for ChatGPT, while Google Gemini began rolling out natively to Hong Kong users on 16 March 2026, according to the Digital in Asia access tracker. For many local companies already paying for Google Workspace, Gemini is the AI assistant they can use without any grey-area setup, which makes this change directly relevant.
How can a small business use skills day to day?
The best skills capture tasks your team repeats every week and currently explains by word of mouth. Typical candidates are quotation replies, product descriptions, meeting summaries, job adverts and complaint responses. Each one turns a senior staff member's know-how into instructions anyone can reuse.
Consider a 12-person trading company in Kwun Tong. Every day, three sales staff answer enquiries for kitchen equipment. The boss has strong views on how replies should look, but only one salesperson reliably follows them. Three skills fix most of that:
--- "Quote reply": confirm the model number, quote in HKD, state delivery time in working days, mention the 14-day price validity, and never promise stock without checking the sheet.
--- "House tone": warm but brief, no exclamation marks, English replies in British spelling, Chinese replies in formal written Chinese.
--- "Follow-up check": end every reply by listing what the customer still needs to confirm.
Because skills stack, a salesperson can call "Quote reply" and "House tone" together on the same enquiry. The boss's standards now live in the software rather than in one employee's head, which also means they do not walk out the door when that employee resigns.
Other businesses would choose different skills. A restaurant might keep a "menu description" skill that always mentions allergens and portion size. A property agency might keep a "listing write-up" skill that follows the Estate Agents Authority's rules on describing saleable area. A tutoring centre might keep a "parent update" skill with a fixed three-paragraph structure.
Google also says Workspace users can build skills in Google Docs with a skill builder and share them with the team. One limitation to plan around: skills do not currently sync between the Gemini app and Workspace apps. If you want the same skill in both places, you must create it twice.
How do you write a good Gemini skill?
Write a skill the way you would brief a sensible new hire: say what the task is, what a good result looks like, what to avoid, and give one real example. Keep each skill focused on a single job, and test it on three real cases before sharing it with the team.
A practical recipe that works for most owners:
--- Step 1, name the job precisely. "Customer emails" is too broad. "Reply to a delivery-delay complaint" is right.
--- Step 2, describe the finished result. Length, language, structure, and anything that must always appear, such as an order number or a refund policy line.
--- Step 3, list the "never" rules. Never admit legal liability. Never offer a discount above 10%. Never invent a delivery date.
--- Step 4, paste one excellent past example. A real reply that your best staff member wrote teaches the AI more than a paragraph of adjectives.
--- Step 5, test and trim. Run the skill on three real cases. When the output is wrong, fix the instruction rather than the output, so the next result improves too.
If your team already has Gems, start by opening each Gem, copying its instructions, and recreating it as a skill. Google offers a manual migration route through its help centre. Doing it yourself now, rather than waiting for the automatic March 2027 conversion, gives you time to tidy instructions that have grown messy.
What do people get wrong about Gemini skills?
The three most common mistakes are assuming Gems vanish immediately, assuming skills are a technical feature for IT staff, and assuming a skill makes Gemini's answers accurate. Gems keep working until at least March 2027, skills are written in plain language, and a skill improves consistency, not truth.
--- "My Gems will disappear this week." No. Business accounts keep full Gem access until at least 1 March 2027. The one change already in effect is that you can no longer add new "Ask a Gem" steps to automated flows in Workspace Studio. Existing steps keep running until the cut-off.
--- "Skills need a programmer." The SKILL.md format sounds technical, but a skill is mostly ordinary sentences. If you can write a staff handbook page, you can write a skill.
--- "A skill makes the answer correct." A skill controls format, tone and rules. It does not check facts. If the AI is quoting prices, it still needs the real price list, and a person should still check anything sent to a customer.
--- "More skills means better results." Stacking five overlapping skills can produce contradictions, such as one asking for 100 words and another asking for a full breakdown. Two or three focused skills per task usually work best.
The change also follows a wider pattern. OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs in favour of a newer format, as we covered in our guide to what replaces custom GPTs. AI companies are moving away from separate custom chatbots and towards portable instruction files that work anywhere. Writing your know-how down in plain language is the habit that survives every product change.
Do I need to do anything about Gemini skills right now?
You do not need to act today, but this quarter is a good time to prepare. List the Gems your team uses, decide which deserve to become skills, and pick one repeated task to turn into your first skill. Owners who start in October will have a tested library before Gems are retired.
A simple four-week plan for a small team:
--- Week 1: ask each staff member which Gems or saved prompts they use, and which tasks they explain to newcomers most often.
--- Week 2: write two skills for the most repeated tasks, using the five-step recipe above.
--- Week 3: let two staff members use them on real work and collect what went wrong.
--- Week 4: fix the instructions, then share the skills with the whole team.
If you also use Gemini's research notebooks, our explainer on what a Gemini business notebook is shows how notebooks and skills fit together: notebooks hold your reference material, skills hold your way of working.
The bottom line on Gemini skills
Gemini skills turn the way your best people work into instructions the whole team can reuse. They replace Gems gradually, with business accounts keeping Gems until at least 1 March 2027, and they are available to Hong Kong companies on Google Workspace now. The businesses that benefit most will not be the ones with the most technical staff. They will be the ones that bother to write down how things should be done.
AI tools will keep changing their names and formats. What stays valuable is a clear record of how your business works, written in plain language. That is where good AI adoption starts, and it is the spirit behind our promise: We understand AI. UD stands with you.
Reviewed by the UD AI team.
Skills work best when you know which tasks in your business are ready for AI. Take the free AI Ready Check to find your strongest starting points, and we will walk you through it step by step, from picking the first task to writing instructions your whole team can use.
