Before your Gems become Skills, find the ones doing real work.

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If your company runs on Google Workspace, some of your people have built Gems. A Gem that rewrites emails in the house tone. One that turns a call transcript into a client summary. One that drafts the first pass of a proposal from a template somebody attached to it a year ago.

Those Gems are going away. Google announced on September 30 that Skills, its new name for saved, reusable instructions in Gemini, will replace Gems. The Workspace rollout started today, October 5, on Rapid Release domains, with Scheduled Release domains starting October 19. The Gemini app follows on October 13.

The dates that matter for a business account come later. On November 17, Gems move into the Gemini app's settings panel and keep working. No sooner than March 1, 2027, business and enterprise users can't create, edit, or use Gems at all. Any Workspace Studio flow with an "Ask a Gem" step stops working, and whatever Gems are left get converted into draft skills. Personal accounts lose Gems starting in November. Education accounts get until June 2027. Google says it will give admins at least 30 days' notice before the automatic migration, and Android Authority reports that you already can't add a new Ask a Gem step to a flow.

One more wrinkle: a skill you make in the Gemini app doesn't show up in Workspace on its own. If people use it in both places, they make it twice.

None of this is an emergency. It's a deadline five months out, and that's exactly enough time to do it properly or forget about it until something breaks.

Most of them can just move

Let's be fair to the auto-migration. Most Gems are shortcuts. Someone got tired of pasting the same paragraph of instructions and saved it. If that Gem turns into a draft skill next spring and nobody touches it, very little happens. The person notices, tidies it up, moves on.

Don't turn those into a project. Tell people the dates, point them at Google's migration guide, and let them recreate the ones they care about when Skills reach them.

The reason to spend any time on this at all is the handful that aren't shortcuts anymore.

Find the ones somebody's week depends on

Somewhere in most teams there's a Gem that has quietly become part of how work gets done. Nobody decided that. It just got useful, then shared, then relied on.

You can usually spot them by asking a few plain questions:

• Is it inside a Workspace Studio flow? Anything with an Ask a Gem step is the clearest case. That step stops working on the cutoff date, and the flow around it fails with it.
• Does its output leave the building? If what it writes gets pasted into a client email, a quote, a report, or a ticket reply, then a change in its behavior is a change in what your customers see.
• Is it shared across a team? A Gem five people use every day is a tool, whether or not anyone calls it one.
• Does it lean on attached files? Gems can pull in documents from Drive. If the template or price sheet it reads from has moved or gone stale, the migration is a good moment to find out.
• Did the person who built it leave? Then nobody knows exactly what the instructions say or why.

Ten minutes of asking around usually turns up a short list. For a small team it might be two Gems. For a larger one, maybe a dozen. Those are processes that happen to live in a chat window, and they deserve the same care you'd give any other process you're about to move.

Give each one four things before it moves

For every Gem on that short list, we'd do the same four things.

An owner. One named person who decides what the instructions say and who gets asked when the output looks off. Without one, the draft skill sits in someone's settings until a customer notices.

A copy of the instructions you control. Open the Gem, copy its full instructions and the list of attached files into a document your team owns. This is the single most useful step, and it takes a minute. Whatever happens to the product, the thinking that went into it is now yours.

A few test cases. Pick five or six real inputs the Gem handles: a normal one, a messy one, the awkward edge case people complain about. Save each input with the output you'd call good. Run them through the old Gem now, and through the new skill after you move it. If the answers drift, you'll see it on a Tuesday afternoon instead of in a client's inbox. We make the same argument for agents in treat agent changes like releases. A saved prompt that people depend on is no different.

A decision about where it should live. Most of these become Skills and that's fine. Some shouldn't.

When a Skill isn't the right home

A Skill is still a person typing a slash command and reading what comes back. That's the right shape for drafting, summarizing, and rewriting, where someone reviews the result before it goes anywhere.

It's the wrong shape when the job has quietly grown past that. A few signs:

• It needs to read from a system of record, like the CRM, the order system, or the price list, not from a file someone attached.
• It writes somewhere or kicks off the next step, rather than handing text back to a person.
• It should run on a schedule or when something arrives, without anyone opening a chat.
• You need to know afterward what it was asked, what it answered, and who approved it.

When those are true, the migration is a good excuse to move the work into something built for it: a small automation with a clear owner, logging, and a review step where it matters. That's the kind of work we do in business process automation and AI applications—taking knowledge that lived in one place and turning it into software the team can run, the same move we made when Paddle8 shipping routes left spreadsheets for an API. It's usually smaller than people expect, because the hard part, the instructions, already exists. Someone already wrote it into a Gem.

So here's the short version for this week. Tell people the dates. Find the few Gems that run real work. Copy their instructions somewhere you own, write down a handful of test cases, and give each one a name. If one of them turns out to be a process wearing a chat window, tell us what it does and we'll help you decide whether it needs a Skill or a proper home.