Anthropic has introduced a new general feature called Skills that lets Claude AI access specialized expertise on demand to more efficiently deploy agents in enterprise workflows. “Claude will only access a skill when it’s relevant to the task at hand,” like when working with Excel or following an organization’s brand guidelines, Anthropic explains. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts and resources that Claude can load as needed. And users can also build their own for use across Claude apps, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK and the Anthropic API. Anthropic joins tech giants such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft in efforts to make AI agents more practically useful.

The Verge says Claude Skills “is designed to improve Claude’s AI agent capabilities for your work specifically, so you don’t have to spend as much time writing the perfect prompt or referring to past context every time you’re trying to accomplish a task,” noting Skills have been added to Claude Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise subscribers.

“Skills enables users to create folders containing instructions, code scripts, and reference materials that Claude can automatically load when relevant,” reports VentureBeat, adding that “the system marks a fundamental shift in how organizations can customize AI assistants, moving beyond one-off prompts to reusable packages of domain expertise that work consistently across an entire company.”

“Skills are based on our belief and vision that as model intelligence continues to improve, we’ll continue moving towards general-purpose agents that often have access to their own filesystem and computing environment,” Anthropic engineer Mahesh Murag told VentureBeat.

Anthropic-created Skills can be used to have Claude read and generate professional Excel spreadsheets with formulas, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents  and fillable PDFs, while developers “can create custom Skills to extend Claude’s capabilities for their specific use cases,” Anthropic notes in a news post. A tech deep-dive is available on an engineering blog post.

VentureBeat also gets fairly deep, writing that unlike typical approaches to customizing AI assistants, “Skills can contain an unbounded amount of context to teach Claude how to complete a task or series of tasks” because Skills are premised on agents being able to “autonomously and intelligently navigate a filesystem and execute code.”

Prior to general release last week, Anthropic had been using Skills for some of Claude’s native capabilities — like file creation and editing, introduced in September — with many of those functions now provided as prebuilt Skills.