Skills — teaching your agent playbooks
Skills are reusable playbooks that teach your agent how to handle a specific task the same reliable way every time — step by step, in your words.
Last updated July 14, 2026
A Skill is a playbook. It captures how you want a particular job done — the steps, the rules, the tone, the checks — so your agent handles it the same reliable way every time instead of improvising.
Think of tools as what an agent can do and skills as how it should do it. Where a tool is a single action, a skill strings several together into a repeatable procedure.
When to use a skill
Add a skill whenever a task has a right way to be done that you'd otherwise have to explain again and again. For example:
- "How to qualify a new inbound lead and log it in the CRM."
- "How to write our weekly customer update, section by section."
- "How to triage a support email and decide whether to escalate."
Building a skill
Give the skill a clear title so the agent knows when it applies, like "Draft a proposal follow-up."
Describe the process in plain language — the order to do things, which tools to use, and any rules to always follow.
Where it helps, include a good example of the finished result. Agents learn well from a model to match.
Skills, tools, and knowledge
These work together. A skill often references the agent's Tools to carry out its steps, and pulls facts from Knowledge to stay accurate. Keep procedures in skills and reference material in knowledge — that separation keeps both easy to maintain.
Starting from a template
Many agents in Explore Templates come with skills already written. Starting from a template is a fast way to see how a well-structured playbook reads before you write your own.