AI & Models
Google retires Gemini's Gems in favor of 'skills'
Google is shutting down Gemini's Gems feature, which let users build custom AI assistants, automatically migrating them to a new "skills" format starting November 17, 2026.
As all-in-one AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it’s shutting down the Gemini feature known as “Gems,” which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. The work users invested in creating Gems won’t be destroyed, though: Gems will be automatically migrated to “skills” that can be used across different AI tasks.
Details about the change are being shared in the Gemini app, where a message warns users that Gems will become skills starting on November 17, 2026. The company said it will migrate the Gems to the new format, so users won’t have to do anything to make the transition. The Gems themselves will remain usable until then.
Launched in 2024, Gems were meant to help users teach their AI to perform certain tasks without having to repeat the instructions. Some of Google’s pre-made Gems included a learning coach, a brainstorming assistant, a career guide, a coding partner and an editor. Users could also make Gems for their own needs, like a running coach, a nutritionist or a vacation planner, and these custom assistants could be shared with others — something Google had hoped would help make its Gemini AI app more popular.
The Gems shutdown is another example of why Google shouldn’t be so quick to give every new AI feature its own brand name, icon and prominent placement in its app’s navigation, especially if it’s going to shuffle things around over time, merging one feature into another — a failing point of Google’s strategy that predates the AI era, when the company ran multiple different messaging and communication apps at once. Even as skills, the former Gems still aren’t as consumer-friendly as simply typing text to a chatbot like Meta’s Muse: instead, users have to enter a forward slash ”/” in a task thread to select the skill they want to use, an interface that engineers, rather than regular users, tend to prefer. Gems’ wind-down was first reported over the weekend by 9to5Google.
Why it matters
Google keeps building capable AI features and then burying them behind confusing branding and navigation, which matters because it’s competing against consumer AI agents like Muse and Instinct that win on nothing but ease of use.