OpenAI has rolled out Skills, a feature that lets ChatGPT users save sets of instructions so the chatbot handles recurring tasks consistently.
Skills are reusable, shareable workflows that can bundle instructions, examples and code, teaching the model how to perform a specific job.
Once installed, ChatGPT can call up one or more Skills automatically when it judges them useful, rather than waiting to be told.
The company launched the feature in July as part of ChatGPT Work, its push to turn the chatbot into an agent for the workplace.
Who gets it
Access is limited to its paid Business, Enterprise, Healthcare and Edu plans, and is not offered to free or Plus users.
Business customers may need an administrator to switch the feature on, while it defaults to active on many Enterprise workspaces.
Skills sit under the Plugins menu on the ChatGPT website and the new desktop application.
Typical uses include drafting emails in a set brand voice, turning meeting notes into structured summaries, and converting messy spreadsheets into shareable dashboards.
Users can build one by writing the instructions directly or by talking the model through a process for it to copy.
A play for loyalty
The move mirrors a feature offered by rival Anthropic, whose Claude assistant already lets users create Skills to standardise repeat work.
OpenAI says data shared with a Skill is not used to train its models by default on business plans.
For the company, the appeal is retention: the more a firm encodes its own workflows into ChatGPT, the harder the tool is to abandon.
Whether Skills prove sticky will depend on how reliably the model applies them without fresh prompting each time.
Two crossheads felt like the ceiling for a piece this short; a third would have chopped it up more than it helped. If you want them doing more navigational work, I can retitle to signal content harder, "Business tiers only" and "Squaring up to Claude", say.
