Gemini Gems become skills from November: what migrates, what breaks, and how to move early

If you rely on custom Gems in the Gemini app, they’re being replaced by skills, and the switch for personal Google accounts starts next month. Migration is automatic, but migrated Gems land as inactive drafts, and several tools Gems could use don’t work in skills yet. So check your important Gems before November. Google’s help center has the steps to move them by hand now. (Sources: Gemini Apps Help: transition from Gems to skills, Workspace admin transition guide)

Skills use the Markdown-based SKILL.md format, and Google says you can import skills made on other platforms by uploading their SKILL.md files. For builders, that means a skill you already wrote for another agent can now run in Gemini chat too, within the limits below.

The dates

Who	What happens
Gemini app, all users	Skills rolling out since October 13, finishing by mid-November
Personal Google accounts	Gems support ends in November 2026. The Gems manager notice reads “Gems will become skills starting Nov 17, 2026” (9to5Google)
Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit	Gems stop working no sooner than March 1, 2027; remaining Gems migrate to draft skills
Workspace education	No sooner than June 1, 2027

Google’s Workspace admin timeline also lists November 17 as the day Gems move into Settings, where they can still be created, edited and used. Opal and Gems by Google Labs shut down in November too, and Labs Gems won’t migrate (Google blog).

Skills inside Workspace apps are delayed. Scheduled Release domains were due to start on October 19, but an October 13 update says both Rapid and Scheduled Release rollouts are “delayed until further notice” (Workspace Updates). Skills also don’t sync between the Gemini app and Workspace, so to use one in both you have to rebuild it in Workspace Studio. New Workspace Studio flows can no longer add an “Ask a Gem” step, though existing ones keep working until 2027.

What automatic migration keeps, and what it doesn’t

Google says migrated skills keep the Gem’s name, description, instructions and uploaded knowledge files, and Drive sharing settings carry over. But each one shows up as an inactive draft that you must review and activate before you can use or share it.

What’s missing for now:

• Default tools. Create video, Create music, Canvas, Deep Research and Guided Learning don’t work with skills. A Gem built around one of these won’t behave the same way after migration.
• GitHub files aren’t supported in skills.
• Sharing and Drive files in Gemini app skills are promised “in the coming weeks.”
• Per-Gem chat history. Skills don’t have a page listing their past chats, so those chats just appear in the normal side panel.

Moving a Gem by hand

1. At gemini.google.com, open Gems, click Edit on the Gem, and download each knowledge file one at a time.
2. Put the files in a folder named after the skill, in lowercase with hyphens, like weekly-report-writer.
3. Open the Skills page, click Create manually, and paste in the Gem’s name, description and instructions.
4. If there are files, use Skill actions > Download to get a .zip with the new SKILL.md. Move that SKILL.md into your folder, then choose Skill actions > Replace skill and upload the folder. The folder name must match the skill name.

Upload limits worth knowing before you import a skill

Per Google’s create and manage skills page:

• Put SKILL.md in the root folder, and give the skill a lowercase, hyphenated name.
• Uploads can total up to 100 MB. Plain-text files, code (.py, .sh), config, PDFs and images work, but .docx and .xlsx don’t, so convert those first.
• Scripts can’t make requests to the internet.
• Hidden binaries like .DS_Store or .pyc can make an upload fail. Running find my-skill -name '.DS_Store' -delete before uploading takes care of the Mac ones.
• You can make unlimited skills, but only 100 can be active at once. You also need to be 18 or older with Keep Activity turned on. Uploading only works on the web app and the Mac app.

If you’re writing skills that need to work in more than one tool, the description is what decides when a skill gets picked automatically. Our guide to writing Claude skills explains how that works. For background on where Gemini skills started, see our Gemini Spark guide and NotebookLM’s move to Gemini 3.5 with built-in skills.