Skills

Skills are reusable packages of instructions, templates, and tools that teach Glean 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 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

Glean Skills

Glean Skills are built-in Skills that Glean runs under the hood to power Assistant capabilities. You won't see them in the Skills library or Shared tab. Instead, when Assistant invokes a Glean Skill while answering you, the Skill appears as an intermediate step you can click into to see what it did.

Personal 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.

Shared Skills

Skills that teammates share with you, or that your organization publishes for a team or the whole company. Shared Skills appear in a separate Shared area so you can tell them apart from your own. You can use a Skill someone shares with you without recreating it, and you stay on the owner's latest version as they make updates. See Sharing Skills.

Automatic Skill routing

Glean automatically evaluates your query against available Skill descriptions and determines whether a Skill is relevant. If it is, Glean 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. You can also import Skills from public GitHub repositories using a URL.

Getting started

Accessing Skills

Go to Settings → Skills in your Glean instance. You'll see two tabs:

• Personal — Skills you've created.
• Shared — Skills teammates or your organization have shared with you.

Uploading a Skill

1. Click Add in the top-right corner of the Skills page.
2. Choose Upload a skill and select a .zip, .md, or .skill file.
3. The Skill appears under the Personal tab once uploaded.

If you upload a Skill with the same name as an existing one, Glean prompts you to replace the existing Skill instead of creating a duplicate.

Importing a Skill from GitHub

You can import a Skill directly from a public GitHub repository. Glean fetches the Skill, validates it, and records the source so the Skill can stay in sync with upstream changes.

1. Go to Settings → Skills and click + Add Skill.
2. Select Import from GitHub.
3. Paste a public GitHub URL. Supported formats include:
   • A repository root URL (for example, https://github.com/org/repo)
   • A subtree path (for example, https://github.com/org/repo/tree/main/skills/my-skill)
   • A direct link to a SKILL.md file (for example, https://github.com/org/repo/blob/main/SKILL.md)
4. Click Preview. Glean fetches the Skill and shows the parsed name, description, file tree, and SKILL.md content.
5. Review the preview and click Import.
6. The Skill appears under your Skills with an Imported from GitHub badge.

Glean imports the SKILL.md file along with any bundled supporting files such as templates, reference materials, and scripts. A single Skill can contain up to 100 files across up to 6 directory levels.

note

Use a branch or tag URL when importing. Commit permalink URLs that point to a specific commit aren't supported because they can't stay in sync with upstream changes.

Keeping imported Skills up to date

When you import a Skill from GitHub, Glean records the source URL and the commit it was imported from. About once a day, Glean checks the source repository for upstream changes and automatically pulls any updates into your imported Skill.

Each imported Skill shows one of the following sync statuses:

• Up to date: The Skill matches the latest content in the source repository as of the most recent sync.
• Sync failed: Glean couldn't reach the source. This can happen if the repository or file was moved, renamed, deleted, or made private.

You can also sync a Skill manually from Settings → Skills to refresh it before the next daily sync.

Sync is one-way: changes flow from GitHub into Glean, not the other way around. If you edit an imported Skill in Glean, those changes stay in Glean and aren't pushed back to the source repository.

Creating a Skill via chat

You can create Skills directly by chatting with Glean:

1. Describe the workflow you want to turn into a Skill. For example, "Create a skill for writing weekly status updates."
2. Glean asks clarifying questions about the task, then scaffolds the Skill in canvas.
3. Review the generated Skill, make any edits, and save it. The Skill appears under the Personal tab in Settings → Skills.

Using a Skill in chat

There are multiple ways to use Skills:

• Automatic: Ask Glean a question related to a Skill's domain. If a relevant Skill exists, Glean automatically loads and uses it. Use thinking mode for best results.
• Explicit: Reference a Skill by name in your prompt (for example, "Use my account planning skill to build a plan for Acme Corp").
• Slash command: Type / in the composer to see your available Skills and invoke one directly (for example, /my-skill-name).
• From the composer: Click + in the composer and select a Skill to view it or invoke it directly.

Managing your Skills

From Settings → Skills, use the toggle and the three-dot menu on each Skill card to:

• Enable/Disable — Toggle Skills on or off.
• Edit — Update Skill instructions at any time.
• Share — Share a Skill with teammates, departments, or groups. See Sharing Skills.
• Replace — Re-upload a Skill to update its contents.
• Delete — Remove Skills you no longer need.
• Download — Export any Skill as a .zip file for portability.

Admin controls

Admins can enable or turn off Skills for their organization through Feature rollouts in the Admin Console, and can enable or turn off GitHub import separately.

• Whether Skills are turned on, and for whom.
• Whether you can share Skills, and who you can share them with.
• Which Skills are published to a team or the whole organization.

Admins turn Skills on or off, and can pilot them with a test group, from Admin console → Skills → Setup. See Roll out Skills to a test group.

Admins can also set up roles and configure sharing for Skills. See Set up Skills and manage roles and Share Skills.

Sharing Skills

Once you've built a Skill that works well, you can share it with teammates so they benefit from the same expertise without sending files back and forth or maintaining stale copies.

note

Your administrator controls whether you can share Skills and who you can share them with. If sharing options are unavailable, your admin hasn't enabled sharing for your account.

Share a Skill

1

Open the share dialog

Go to Settings → Skills, find the Skill you want to share, click its three-dot menu, and select Share.

2

Choose who to share with

Under People with access, add individual teammates, departments, or groups. You can also use Copy link to send a direct link to anyone who has access.

3

Set a permission level

Choose a permission level for each recipient:

• Viewer — Can use the Skill.
• Editor — Can use and edit the Skill.

You are the Skill's Owner by default. Owner can't be assigned from the share dialog.

4

Optionally allow company-wide access

Under General access, switch from Restricted to people with access to Anyone at [Company] with the link can view to let anyone in the organization find and use the Skill. This option requires admin permission.

Recipients are notified by email when you share a Skill with them, and again when you update a Skill they've added — so they always have your latest version. Admins can publish Skills to the whole organization from the Admin console.

Use Skills shared with you

Skills that teammates share with you appear in the Shared tab of Settings → Skills, separate from the Skills you've created.

• Add a shared Skill to start using it. Adding a Skill keeps it available in chat and keeps you on the owner's latest version.
• Skills your organization publishes may already be enabled for you, depending on how your admin set them up.
• You'll receive an email when a Skill you've added is updated, so you can review what changed.

When Skill names overlap

If a Skill shared with you has the same name as one of your Personal Skills, your Personal Skill takes precedence. Glean keeps both available and adjusts the name of the shared Skill so you can tell them apart.

Skill file format

A Skill is structured as a folder containing:

• SKILL.md (required): The main instructions file with YAML frontmatter (name and description fields) 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. Glean 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 Glean 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 Glean) 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. Glean 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 Glean for the best skill routing and execution quality.

Current limitations

• Skill routing in non-thinking mode: Skill routing works in non-thinking mode, but is most reliable in thinking mode. Use thinking mode for the best routing and execution quality.
• GitHub import is public repositories only: Importing Skills from GitHub supports public repositories. Private repository support isn't available in this release.
• GitHub sync is one-way: Changes flow from GitHub into Glean, not from Glean back to GitHub. If you edit an imported Skill in Glean, those changes stay in Glean.

FAQ

Skills work best with advanced reasoning models. We recommend using thinking mode in Glean for the best skill routing and execution quality.

Yes. Skills that follow the open Agent Skills standard (used by Claude, OpenAI, Cursor, LangChain, and others) can be uploaded directly into Glean via .zip or .md file.

Skills operate within Glean's existing permission model. Glean will only access data that you have permission to view. Enabling Skills doesn't grant new data access.

Yes, if your admin has enabled sharing for your account. From Settings → Skills, open the Skill's three-dot menu and select Share, then add teammates, departments, or groups as a Viewer or Editor. Sharing with your entire organization requires admin permission. See Sharing Skills.

Your organization can publish Skills for your team or company. Published Skills may be enabled for you automatically and appear in the Shared area of Settings → Skills.

Glean evaluates your query against available Skill descriptions and determines whether a Skill is relevant. If it is, Glean loads the relevant portions of the Skill to inform its response. This routing happens automatically in thinking mode.

You can upload Skills as .md (single markdown file) or .zip / .skill (archive containing SKILL.md and optional supporting files like templates, examples, and scripts). You can also import a Skill directly from a public GitHub repository by pasting a URL.

Yes. A Skill can contain up to 100 files. The maximum upload size is 10 MB for .zip files and 16 MB uncompressed.

Yes. Go to Settings → Skills, click + Add Skill, and select Import from GitHub. Paste a supported URL — a repository root, a subtree path, or a direct SKILL.md link — and Glean imports the Skill with all bundled supporting files.

Glean records the source URL and commit for each imported Skill, then checks the source repository for upstream changes about once a day and automatically pulls any new content. Sync is one-way, from GitHub into Glean. You can also sync a Skill manually from Settings → Skills to refresh it before the next daily sync.

Glean refreshes imported Skills about once a day. The daily sync automatically pulls upstream changes from the source repository into Glean. To refresh sooner, sync the Skill manually from Settings → Skills.

No. Sync is one-way from GitHub into Glean. Changes you make to an imported Skill in Glean aren't pushed back to the source repository.

No. Commit permalink URLs point to a fixed commit and can't stay in sync with upstream changes. Use a branch or tag URL instead.

No. GitHub import is a way to bring Skills into Glean from a repository. Governance controls — including admin enablement, sharing, and publishing — remain separate and continue to apply to imported Skills.

Not yet. GitHub import currently supports public repositories only.

For most users, no — Skills only run when they're relevant to your query, so non-skill queries are unaffected. If your organization has a large number of Skills enabled, Assistant may take slightly longer to evaluate which Skill (if any) to apply, since it reads each Skill's name and description to decide. The impact is small in practice but scales with the number of Skills available.