Google Replaces Gemini Gems With "Skills": Personal Accounts in November 2026, Business Workspace No Earlier Than March 2027

Google is adding skills, saved custom instructions you can reuse, to the Gemini app and Workspace, and phasing out Gems. Personal accounts lose Gems in November 2026; Workspace business and enterprise no earlier than March 1, 2027; education no earlier than June 1, 2027. Skills in the Gemini app do not sync to Workspace.

Gemini Google Workspace Gems skills generative-AI

On September 30 (US time), Google announced that it is bringing skills, saved custom instructions that can be reused, to Google Workspace and the Gemini app, and that Gems, until now the place to keep such instructions, will be phased out¹. Leftover Gems will be converted automatically, but they arrive as drafts, and only inside the Gemini app. Organizations that hand out Gems as work templates in Workspace, or that wire Gems into Workspace Studio flows, will have work to do before the deadlines.

Skills are invoked inside the conversation and can be combined

A skill is a set of saved instructions you can apply whenever you prompt Gemini, whether in its own app or in most Workspace apps¹. Google’s examples include a skill that keeps blog drafts in a company’s voice and one that speeds up lesson preparation.

The Workspace Updates post names two ways skills differ from Gems. First, they run inline in ordinary chat threads, and several can be layered in a single prompt. In Google’s example, a vendor-assessment skill and an executive-email skill are paired so that the vendor analysis and the recommendation draft come out of one request. Second, skills are written in SKILL.md, an open, Markdown-based format, so skills built on other platforms can be imported into Gemini and Workspace.

According to the Gemini app help page, typing / and then the skill’s name calls it up in a chat, and Gemini may also apply a skill on its own when it judges the skill relevant³. There is no cap on how many you create, but no more than 100 may be switched on simultaneously.

End dates depend on the account type

When Gems stop working varies with the type of account used to sign in. The Gemini app help page gives November 2026 for personal Google accounts, March 2027 for non-profit, business and enterprise accounts on Workspace, and June 2027 for education accounts³. Opal, Google’s experimental mini-app builder, and Gems by Google Labs also end in November.

The Workspace Updates post and the admin help page list the dates that matter to Workspace users¹².

Date	What happens
October 5, 2026	Workspace rollout of skills begins (Rapid Release finishes by October 12; Scheduled Release starts October 19 and is expected to finish in mid-November)
October 13, 2026	Gemini app rollout of skills begins (expected to finish in mid-November)
November 17, 2026	Gems relocate to Settings inside the Gemini app; creating, editing and using them still works
March 1, 2027 at the earliest	Business, enterprise: creating, editing and using Gems is no longer possible, and they vanish from Settings; Workspace Studio flows built with an “Ask a Gem” step cease to run; leftover Gems become draft skills
June 1, 2027 at the earliest	Education accounts: the same, and Gems also disappear from Google Classroom and from external LMSs connected through Gemini LTI

Both 2027 dates are framed as the earliest possible date, not a fixed one. Google says it will give admins the details of the automatic migration at least 30 days ahead.

Skills in Workspace are limited to users 18 and older on the Business and Enterprise editions, Google AI Pro for Education, and the AI Expanded Access add-on¹. On Enterprise Starter the two documents disagree: the Workspace Updates post includes it, while the eligibility list on the admin help page does not².

What remains after the automatic migration

The automatic migration does not leave Gems ready to use. According to the admin help page, migrated Gems appear among the creator’s skills as drafts that are switched off, and they cannot be used or shared until the creator reviews and turns each one on². Names, descriptions, instructions and uploaded knowledge files carry over, and so do the Drive permissions and sharing settings.

The bigger catch is that skills made in Gemini’s own app and those made in Workspace apps are kept apart, with no syncing¹. The migration creates skills only on the app side; to use the same instructions in Workspace apps, they have to be built again on the Workspace side. Google itself tells users to create a skill in each place if they want it in both.

In Workspace Studio, new flows containing an “Ask a Gem” step can no longer be created. Existing flows keep running for now, but for business and enterprise they will stop on March 1, 2027 at the earliest. The admin help page advises having flow owners swap that step for skills or another action².

There is also a feature gap. The Gemini app help page states that, for now, most of the built-in tools Gems could use, such as video and music creation, Canvas, Deep Research and Guided Learning, are unavailable to skills³. Sharing, adding Google Drive files and adding Gemini Notebook notebooks are slated to come to skills in the next few weeks. Anyone whose Gems depend on those features will likely want to time a manual move around that rollout.

The help page also walks through moving a Gem by hand³. You download the Gem’s knowledge files, then create a skill on the Skills page in Settings by pasting in the name, description and instructions. To include files, you download the new skill as a .zip containing SKILL.md, put it in one folder with the knowledge files, and upload the folder to replace the skill. The admin help page likewise recommends nudging creators to rebuild their most important Gems by hand early.

Schools also lose Gems in Classroom

In schools, Gems are used not only in the Gemini app but also in Google Classroom and in external LMSs through Gemini LTI. For teachers on Classroom or Gemini LTI, Google recommends moving to Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), which is available now, and to Guided Learning, which is coming to Classroom soon¹. Classes that give students Gems will need a replacement before the shutdown, which falls no earlier than June 1, 2027.

A common unit for “skills”

Writing skills in SKILL.md can be read as a move to treat Gemini’s custom instructions as the same kind of object as ones made outside Gemini. In August, GitHub made Agent Plugins 1.0, which bundles skills and MCP servers into one package that compatible clients can share, generally available across Copilot. Google Cloud’s industry editions of Gemini Enterprise, announced in August, likewise ship industry skills, reusable packages of instructions and context.

In this transition, though, even inside Google, skills are stored separately on the app side and the Workspace side. A shared format does not yet remove the need to rebuild a skill for each place it lives. For organizations running Gems, a sensible first step toward the March 2027 deadline is to inventory their Gems and any flows using Ask a Gem, and decide which ones to rebuild in Workspace.