Skills reach the Gemini app from 13 October and finish by mid-November. The Workspace version, due this week, is delayed until further notice.
Most sellers already keep a prompt library; it lives in a notes file and gets pasted in again every morning. Skills move that paste inside the tool, and the retirement notice still matters more than the feature: anyone who built a Gem for call summaries, discovery questions or objection handling owns a migration they did not plan, on a date Google has not given. What the delay adds is a split a seller can work around. The surface that is shipping is the personal one, with no admin controls and no sharing yet, so for the next few weeks a skill lives on one account and goes nowhere. The version a company could actually govern, the Workspace one, was named down to the edition and due this week, and now has no date. Build in the app if you want the practice, but do not rebuild the team's shared prompts there expecting them to carry over.
A "Gem" was Gemini's name for a saved custom setup: you wrote the instructions once and opened that Gem when you needed it. A "skill" is the replacement, and the difference is when it fires. Google says Gemini can "automatically run them whenever you enter a matching prompt," so you type your request the normal way and Gemini applies the saved instructions itself. "Skills in the Gemini app" and "skills in Workspace" are two launches of the same idea: the first is the chat app, the second is the same feature inside Gmail, Docs and the rest, and it is the one an admin can switch on or off. "Rapid Release" and "Scheduled Release" are the two speeds a Workspace domain can be set to; your admin picked one years ago, and it decides whether a feature reaches you early or a couple of weeks later. "Delayed until further notice" means what it says: the dates are withdrawn and nothing has replaced them.
The short version: the Gemini app gets skills over the next month, the Workspace version has been pulled off the calendar, and your old Gems are still being retired into skills on a date nobody has given.
Google is rolling out skills in the Gemini app, a saved set of instructions Gemini reuses when a prompt matches, and has taken the Google Workspace version of the same feature off the calendar. The release note dated 2026.09.30 said skills "will soon replace Gems as the tool for tailoring instructions for specific tasks," and that "we will automatically migrate your Gems into skills when Gems go away." On 13 October 2026, Google Workspace Updates attached dates to the app and removed them from Workspace: the app is on a "Gradual rollout starting on October 13, 2026, with expected completion by mid-November, 2026," while skills in Workspace are "Delayed until further notice."
Announced: 2026.09.30 in the Gemini release notes; updated 13 October 2026 in Google Workspace Updates.
Availability: Gemini app skills are "Available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts." Skills in Workspace are named for Business Starter, Standard and Plus; Enterprise Starter, Standard and Plus; Google AI Pro for Education; and AI Expanded Access, and are "Delayed until further notice."
Price: Not stated.
Regions: Not stated beyond "globally."
Google had previously said "the launch to Rapid Release would be complete by October 12, 2026" and that "the rollout to Scheduled Release would begin on October 19, 2026." Both are withdrawn, because "while we work to ensure skills in Workspace launch in a safe and reliable manner, those rollouts are slightly delayed." The age gate split too: "skills in Workspace are available only to users over age 18," while app skills reach "users of all ages." Google points admins to a Help Center article for Workspace and states plainly: "There are no admin controls for skills in the Gemini app." Sharing a skill and Drive integration arrive "In the coming weeks."
What it doesn't do: Neither note names a price, a country list, or a date for Gems being removed, and the 13 October post gives no replacement Workspace date; Google says only "We will share the updated timeline here as soon as it's confirmed." It does not say what happens to a Gem you built if Workspace skills arrive after Gems are gone. Team sharing is announced rather than shipped. Nothing describes a skill running without you: in the app it runs "whenever you enter a matching prompt."
SDR — Save your highest-volume prompt first: the research-to-first-line pass you run on every new name. It lands in the app, not in Gmail, so expect to carry the output across by hand for now. Then read the next ten outputs against what you would have written yourself, because a skill that applies itself also fails by itself, and you will no longer see the prompt that produced the result.
AE — Combining is still the thing to test, not saving: your writing voice in one skill, the account's context in another, then run a follow-up through both. If that needs more editing than your single long prompt did, keep the long prompt. And do not move deal-specific instructions into a skill you cannot hand over, because sharing is listed as arriving "In the coming weeks" and a deal in flight does not wait for it.
Manager — Find out this week who on the team built Gems, by name. Gems are going away on a date Google has not given, and the Workspace rollout that would have given you a governed replacement is now delayed indefinitely, so the gap between the two is the exposure: a rep losing a working setup mid-quarter. After migration, ask each person to run one real task through the new skill and confirm the output still matches what the Gem gave them.
RevOps — The earlier reading that there is nothing to configure now holds for one surface only. Google states there are no admin controls for skills in the Gemini app, so whatever reps build this month sits outside anything you own. Admin controls do exist for skills in Workspace and the editions are named, but that rollout is delayed until further notice, so there is nothing to switch on yet. Spend the gap writing down which saved instructions the team depends on, because nothing in Gemini will tell you afterwards what was lost.
The instructions worth saving as a skill are the ones you already run on a fixed rhythm, which is exactly what Promptifi's scheduled prompts are built from. Pick the one you re-type most often and set it up once.
Two minutes, once a week. What changed in AI, and what to run because of it.