Skills (Beta)
Skills are reusable packages of instructions, templates, and tools that teach Glean Assistant how to execute specific tasks with domain expertise. Instead of prompting from scratch every time, a Skill captures the structure, decision logic, and know-how behind a task and pairs that knowledge with the tools needed for execution.
General-purpose AI models are powerful but can struggle with domain-specific workflows like account planning, Salesforce analysis, and contract reviews. Skills close this gap by making expertise repeatable, composable, and loaded only when relevant. Skills add zero overhead to queries where they aren't triggered. Your existing Assistant experience remains unchanged for non-skill queries.
Skills follow the open Agent Skills standard, adopted by OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, Cursor, and others. This means you can bring skills from the broader ecosystem into Glean and layer in your own organization's ways of working.
Key concepts
Platform Skills
Glean-built Skills that enhance Assistant's capabilities out of the box. Platform Skills are maintained by Glean and available to all users in your deployment. Current platform skills include Salesforce analysis, with Jira, Figma, Atlassian, and others coming soon.
Personal Skills (My Skills)
Create your own Skills tailored to your workflows. Personal Skills are visible only to you and can be enabled, disabled, edited, or deleted at any time from Settings → Skills.
Automatic Skill routing
Assistant automatically evaluates your query against available Skill descriptions and determines whether a Skill is relevant. If it is, Assistant loads the relevant portions of the Skill to inform its response. You can also explicitly reference a Skill by name in your prompt. Skill routing works best in thinking mode.
Interoperability
Skills built for Claude, OpenAI, Cursor, and other platforms that follow the Agent Skills standard can be imported directly into Glean.
Getting started
Accessing Skills
Go to Settings → Skills in your Glean instance. You'll see two sections: Your Skills (personal) and Platform Skills (maintained by Glean).
Uploading a Skill
- Click + Add Skill in the top-right corner of the Skills page.
- Choose Upload skill and select a
.zip,.md, or.skillfile. - The Skill will appear under "Your Skills" once uploaded.
Creating a Skill via chat
Coming soon. You'll be able to create Skills directly through a conversational experience in Assistant. Glean will ask clarifying questions about your workflow and generate a Skill for you that you can review and save.
Using a Skill in chat
There are two ways to use Skills:
- Automatic: Simply ask Assistant a question related to a Skill's domain. If a relevant Skill exists, Assistant will automatically load and use it. Use thinking mode for best results.
- Explicit: Reference a Skill by name in your prompt (e.g., "Use my account planning skill to build a plan for Acme Corp").
Managing your Skills
From Settings → Skills, you can:
- Enable/Disable — Toggle Skills on or off.
- Edit — Update Skill instructions at any time.
- Delete — Remove Skills you no longer need.
- Download — Export any Skill as a
.zipfile for portability.
Skill file format
A Skill is structured as a folder containing:
- SKILL.md (required): The main instructions file with YAML frontmatter (
nameanddescriptionfields) and natural language instructions. - Additional files (optional): Templates, examples, scripts, and reference materials.
Example use cases
| Use case | Description |
|---|---|
| Account planning | Upload a skill that encodes your organization's account planning best practices. Assistant uses it to generate standardized, high-quality account plans grounded in Salesforce, Gong, and internal docs. |
| Meeting prep and follow-up | Create a skill that pulls from your calendar, email, Slack, and CRM to generate meeting prep briefs or draft follow-up emails with the right tone and context. |
| Domain-specific analysis | Teach Assistant your team's methodology for financial analysis, legal review, or technical documentation so outputs follow your standards consistently. |
| Knowledge base article creation | Use a skill to standardize how support articles are written, ensuring consistent formatting, tone, and completeness from resolved tickets. |
| Daily briefings | Build a personal skill that synthesizes your calendar, email, Slack, and task list into a morning brief you can reference throughout the day. |
Skills vs. Agents
Skills and Agents are complementary features. Here's how to think about when to use each:
| Skills | Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| What they are | Reusable packages of instructions and expertise for specific tasks | End-to-end workflows triggered by events or schedules |
| When to use | When you want consistent, reusable expertise applied to a task on demand | When you want to automate a full process that runs autonomously |
| Example | A market research skill that applies consistent methodology every time | An agent that runs monthly, builds a market report using a skill, and emails it to leadership |
Skills are foundational building blocks that Agents (and Assistant) can invoke. They work together — you don't have to choose one over the other.
Permissions and data access
Skills operate within Glean's existing permission model. Assistant will only access data that you have permission to view. No new data access is granted by enabling Skills.
Tips for writing effective Skills
- If a Skill isn't triggering when you expect it to, Skill routing depends on how well the Skill's name and description match the user's query. Try refining the Skill's description to include clearer keywords and, optionally, negative examples (cases where the Skill should not be used).
- Skills work best with advanced reasoning models. We recommend using thinking mode in Assistant for the best skill routing and execution quality.
Current limitations
The following capabilities are planned but not yet available:
- Skills in Agents — Skills are currently available in Assistant only. Support for Skills within Glean Agents is planned.
- Full code execution — Script execution within Skills is limited. Full sandbox support is in development.
- Skill routing in non-thinking mode — Skill routing works best in thinking mode. Non-thinking mode support will improve over time.