Google is retiring Gems, the customizable assistants inside its Gemini app, and will replace them with a feature called skills beginning Nov. 17, TechCrunch reported Monday. The company will migrate existing Gems automatically, and users do not have to take any action. 9to5Google first reported the change Sunday.

What Happened

Gems launched in 2024 as a way to set up Gemini for a specific recurring job with its own instructions. Google shipped a set of premade Gems, including a learning coach, a brainstorming partner, a career guide, a coding partner and an editor, and users built their own for tasks such as running plans and vacation planning. Gems could also be shared with other people, which helped spread them beyond the users who made them.

Under the new arrangement, those setups become skills. Rather than opening a separate assistant, a user types a forward slash inside a task thread and picks the skill to apply. Gems that people have created will keep working as they do now until Nov. 17, when Google begins converting all of them to skills on its own.

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Google has not detailed what skills can do that Gems could not, beyond the change in how they are invoked.

Why It Matters

For people who rely on Gems, the practical effect should be limited if the automatic conversion works as described: the instructions they wrote carry over, and only the way they reach them changes. The larger shift is in how Gemini is organized. A slash command inside a thread treats a custom setup as something applied to an ongoing piece of work, rather than as a standalone chatbot a user has to switch into. That fits the direction consumer assistants have been moving, toward agents that carry out multi-step tasks and pull in specialized behaviors as needed.

"Skills" is also a term already used elsewhere in the industry for packaged instructions and capabilities that an AI agent can load on demand, so the rename brings Google's vocabulary closer to that of other agent products.

TechCrunch was critical of the change, arguing that Google's repeated rebranding and reshuffling of AI features confuses consumers. It questioned the logic of giving features their own brand only to merge them into something else later. Shared Gems are one place where that could cause friction, since links and instructions circulated under the old name will now point to a feature with a different name and entry point.

Competitive Pressure

The change comes as Google tries to increase use of the Gemini app while rival consumer agents gain attention. Meta has been pushing its Muse agent across its apps and devices, and all-purpose agents that can act across services are drawing users and investment. Consolidating Gems into a skills system tied to task threads is one way for Google to present Gemini as a single agent that adapts to the job, rather than a menu of separate helpers.

What to Watch

  • Whether the Nov. 17 migration preserves each Gem's instructions, attached files and sharing settings without users needing to intervene.
  • What new capabilities, if any, Google attaches to skills beyond the slash-command entry point.
  • Whether shared Gem links continue to work after conversion.
  • Whether skills also replace Gems in the Gemini side panel of Google Workspace apps.