Google is shutting down Gems, the feature that let Gemini users build their own customized chatbot for a repeated task, like writing in a specific style or following a company's brand voice. In its place comes something called Skills, and the interesting part is that Google did not invent this format. Anthropic did.
Anthropic first built Skills for its own chatbot, Claude, in late 2025. A Skill is basically a saved set of instructions, often bundled with example documents, that the AI can pull up whenever it recognizes a matching task. Instead of scrolling through a menu of custom bots, you type a slash and the name of the skill, and the AI applies your rules automatically.
A few months later, Anthropic published the format publicly so any company could use it for free. That is not ordinary generosity, it is a strategy Anthropic has now run twice. It tried this before with the Model Context Protocol, a connector system that lets AI chatbots plug into outside apps and data, and within about a year that format had been adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce.
Skills is following the same path, faster. Microsoft, OpenAI, Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier have already built support for it, and now Google is joining by retiring its own homegrown version, Gems. OpenAI is doing the same thing to its Custom GPTs, the feature many businesses used to build internal assistants for tasks like drafting contracts or answering HR questions.
For a business, the real story is not that Google renamed a menu item. It is that the instructions you build for one AI chatbot are starting to work the same way across different companies' products. That is good news if your team has sunk time into building a custom assistant: the rules you write are less likely to stay trapped inside one vendor's app.
There is a near-term chore, though. If your company built a Gem in Gemini or a Custom GPT in ChatGPT, it should convert automatically, but the deadlines differ by account type. Personal Gemini accounts lose Gems in November, enterprise and nonprofit Workspace accounts get until March 2027, and education accounts until June 2027.
OpenAI's Enterprise customers face a similar switch this fall, with full retirement of Custom GPTs scheduled for December 11. The practical move is simple: check which custom assistants your team actually uses, and confirm they carry over correctly before your deadline. The format underneath is becoming shared property, and right now the company that owns the format, not the chatbot, is ahead in this round.