Ep 736: ChatGPT Skills: How to Use The New Feature from OpenAI and The Best Use Cases

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Imagine your day-to-day business life if you didn't have things like templates, SOPs, or even copy and paste.

Well, maybe you've been using chatGPT without the equivalent of those things.

Yes, we've had for a long time inside of chatGPT very helpful features like customGPTs and projects.

But I still think that there was a certain level of modularity and scalability that we were maybe missing.

And OpenAI may have just changed that with their recently new feature that they released, which is chatGPT skills.

So on today's show, that's exactly what we're going to be diving into to show you how to use them and some of the best use cases.

So here's the big picture.

ChatGPT skills are essentially reusable workflows that teach chatGPT how to follow very specific business procedures consistently that you upload.

And you can do them in natural language.

So they essentially package repeatable tasks, your company's domain knowledge, and executable scripts into a more modular format.

So in the same way, like you might have very strict and refined and defined templates and SOPs at your company, the same thing is now available with chatGPT skills.

And if you're hearing this skills thing and you're like, wait, hasn't this been around for a long time.

Yes, technically, anthropic created and popularized skills back in the fourth quarter of 2025.

And now OpenAI has finally adopted them inside of chatGPT.

So previously, skills were available on the developer side if you were using them in the API or inside codex like I was, but now they are available inside of chatGPT.

Outside is even if you're on a paid $20 a month plus plan or a free plan or the $200 a month pro plan, you're not going to find skills there.

So there's the caveat right now, these are being rolled out and maybe even positioned as teamwork skills, right, because they're only available if you are on the business enterprise team or EDU plans.

So on today's show, here's exactly what you're going to learn if you stick around for the next 20 some minutes.

You're going to learn exactly how to build and deploy your first chatGPT skill live because it is put an AI to work on Wednesdays, our weekly segment where we go hands on it.

We're going to be doing this live. Then you're going to be able to explain the differences between regular custom GPs and these new skill workflows.

And at the end, I'm going to share with you some example and I think really good use cases of skills and along the way I'm actually going to give you what I think is the one cheat code, the best way to actually start using skills today and not really just following the leader and doing what everyone else is doing.

Does that sound good? You're ready to maybe start implementing, you know, templates and SOPs and essentially copy and paste into you or your company's workflow.

It's exactly what we're going to be unwrapping today and apparently you all wanted this right. So if you are listening on the podcast and you're like, man, this guy is always covering these, you know, random things.

Well, I asked you what you wanted to hear, right. So on Wednesdays, like I said, we always go hands on doing some live demos on a newer update model release feature and, you know, I put it up for vote and overwhelmingly our audience said, let's go and learn skills.

All right, well, let's learn together. And if you're new here, welcome to every day, AI, my name's Jordan Wilson. And if you don't know any of this, we do this every single day, not just Wednesdays. It's a daily unedited unscripted live stream podcasts and free daily newsletter, helping every day business leaders, like you and me, keep up with the nonstop breakneck developments of AI.

I tell you what's noteworthy, what matters and you take that information as your cheat code to grow your company and career. So it starts here, but make sure you go to our website at your everyday AI.com, we're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show as well as giving you all of the other AI news that you need to know to stay ahead.

All right, so chat GPT skills. I think this is a big shift into maybe how teams are ultimately using chat GPT.

I kind of think of it as the, you know, kind of aligned in the sand. There's the old chat GPT that was more of a friendly assistant that it's a chatbot.

Now, today's version of chat GPT, it's a full AI operating system, right? Because we've gone from just simple prompts to then it got a little bit more scalable, right? And you didn't just, you know, with prompts, it's essentially one time instructions that live and die there.

And then we over time got things like memory and chat history, which helped and then we got custom GBT's, you know, now almost two years ago, which allows you to create a custom version of chat GPT.

And then we got projects, right? A way to better organize your chats, but also share files and instructions across those chats. And now I think skills are a bigger step in that same direction.

So I do think skills kind of build off of some of the momentum that custom GBT's and projects and memory helped create. And I really do think it's the one thing that encapsulates all of those things together, which will unpack a little bit more.

But this is essentially skills are reusable workflows that your company can package together, you know, your SOPs templates ready to go. So a skill essentially just tells chat GPT how to execute a highly specific workflow, the same over and over without you, the human needing to re-explain and course correct each and every time.

So here's what's new. So like I said, they launched right now in beta just for teams. So the enterprise plan, business plan and EDU workspace plans.

They are powered and made possible by the new GPT 54 model. That's the technical backbone. And eventually we've been told that you'll be able to convert those custom GBT's into skills that's not available yet.

But it does seem like that's going to be rolling out to enterprise plans. But it's very easy to create these bot, you know, from existing GBT's projects because it's super simple. And I'm going to show you how to do all of that.

And the cool thing is like I talked about skills really build off of everything else that you already have because skills can use apps, you can use skills and GBT's at the same time.

And skills essentially cover the basic functionality and then some that you would get inside of projects.

So now that you know how skills are kind of implemented in chat GPT, let's maybe hit rewind and be like what the heck are skills.

So skills, they're just reusable workflows. Think of it as SOPs, your company standardized playbook that teach AI agents exactly what they need to do each and every time a user invokes those skills.

From a visual standpoint, they're folder bundles right each skill is a folder with a you know skills dot markdown file containing core instructions. So you might look at skills and be like, oh, that seems technical not for me, but you don't have to write them by hand right chat GPT will write your skills for you conversationally.

And there is something called the progressive disclosure. So the at first the AI just reads the skills name and descriptions and then it fully loads those all the instructions in the executable actions and files only when this skill is triggered.

So from a visual perspective, think of it like this. And this will maybe help even our podcast audience better understand right I am going to be sharing some visuals and yes on Wednesdays maybe those are the shows that you should go home or at the office go to our website your everyday AI dot com.

We always have the video version out you can watch that for free, but I'm going to do my best to describe visually what this looks like but skills in the same way if you've ever downloaded a program on your computer right and you unzip it.

You unpack it and there's usually multiple files in there and those files essentially tell the computer how to run a program and there's multiple different files right so that's essentially what a skill is it is a kind of a parent folder with you know different markdown files.

Different references assets so these are all things that you can customize in natural language chat you can do it for you.

You can upload files do all of these different things so literally think of it you probably have a similar setup like this maybe in your organization where it has all the different templates maybe there's an instructions file that says how you use the templates.

You know brand guidelines all of those things those are the exact you know kind of the exact backbone that skills kind of can do for the front end AI.

So essentially it uses the agent skills open standard so i'm going to get into how these are reusable both bringing different skills inside of chat GPT skills and how you can ultimately do the same thing and use them elsewhere.

But how you use them well chat GPT will automatically recognize relevant skills based on their name or you can also explicitly activate a desired workflow by mentioning its name right so it's not the same as a GPT where you go and find the GPT or if you're in a normal chat you can click the at button and start typing and then find your GPT and click it right it will sometimes no or infer that you want to use a skill.

Or you can call it out by name and use the skill that way so like I said.

Enthropping made this happen right and you're probably if maybe you're wondering well what's the difference between anthropic skills and chat GPT skills well the good thing is they can be used interchangeably right which is a huge benefit for people that are maybe using both in their day to day work or maybe you're trying to transition from one to the other.

But essentially anthropic created and popularized this skills format and now it's widely used across the AI landscape and open AI essentially just adopted the same open standard after clause success so some of the differences you know skills have only been out in chat GPT for a week and a half and they've been out for you know now like five and a half almost six months I believe inside anthropic so.

When anthropic rolled out skills they were a little rusty right but that's what happens when you are literally blazing the trail right now anthropic skills are much better but I will say open AI skills to start with really really good and for me I actually prefer the UI the user interface and user experience.

Of creating and editing skills inside of chat GPT versus cloth it's to me a little easier even though you know I do think anthropic skills implementation is a little bit more mature and maybe a little bit better in terms of very difficult workflows right now I do think chat GPT are a little bit easier to use and easier to modify and just simpler to understand period.

Now let's talk about the differences between a skill versus a custom GPT or a project so custom GPTs are great don't give me wrong but they lack a lot of the depth and breadth that you get in a skill well mainly because you can use a skill while you're still using a GPT but think of it like this way I like to think of skills.

As describing an entire task in its entirety right where I think custom GPTs maybe help get you closer to a goal but they're not necessarily at least by default really meant to chain all of these agentic skill sets together one after another where that's exactly what skills are right like a very thing of the most detailed you know SOP that you've seen at your company think of skills that way right.

It can interact with other apps that's the great thing skills can interact with different apps you can use them at the same time as you're using GPTs and then you do get the same features and functionalities that you get within projects so by default I do think skills are instantly better more useful and hold more utility than GPTs and projects although there is a lot of crossover.

I think ultimately skills might be the kind of feature or function that takes off the fastest and goes the furthest and you can also use multiple skills to combine automatically to complete a complex and multi-step project more effectively.

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Alright let's get our hands dirty shall we all right so here is the part of putting AI to work on Wednesdays where sometimes things can go wrong so we'll see if they do or not.

All right ready here's my little secret on what you should be doing so I'm going to get this started and then we're going to come back to it as we go and I'll tell you exactly what's going on all right so.

I just hit enter because yeah I like to do these things live sometimes they work well sometimes they don't so if you want to find skills remember you do have to be on a business plan so business enterprise it you et cetera essentially a team plan.

This is not available yet for individuals I hope they do make it so in the bottom left hand corner you're going to click your icon and then you should see a skills section which kind of looks like the icon is kind of like a little brick.

So from there I've been cleaning out my skills you know had a lot of them that I was demoing around but then you're going to have a new skills section which might look and function a little bit similarly as the GPT section.

So you're going to have ones that are installed so for you by default you're only going to have the skill creator which is open a eyes skill that yeah it's kind of meta it's a skill that helps you create skills right and like I said there's skill repositories right you can download skills all those things you know in other places and then upload them so you have your install skills once created by you and then skills that you can share across your team.

That's the big unlock here right I'm just showing off an individual use case here but imagine sharing these across your team in the same way that you can share you know GPT's sharing skills you know again think of it.

SOPs templates copy and paste time savings sharing that across your organization is the big unlock and then in the upper right hand corner you can click new skills so you can create a skill with a chat so you can do that conversationally you can do it even with

without using the skill creator skill although that would be used inside of a chat I know that's confusing so there's technically four different ways you can do a chat naturally without using the skill creator you can do a skill using the skill creator that's number two you can just create with the editor from scratch so not in the chat interface a little more technical right and then you can edit them as well or you can upload them from your computer.

Alright so that's the four different ways that you can create or import skills. Now let me take you to the little cheat code here because I think the natural human tendency is to go find the most popular skill and use it for yourself not always a good idea.

Don't always go out looking you know don't be a solution looking for a problem instead use something very powerful inside of chat you be and that's it's ability to tap into it's memory how you use chat you be your chat history and then I would ask it some questions so I'm going to show you exactly how I'm going to well reset this up I already had a setup and I deleted it so you know can

not show too many things on my screen here but I essentially have two working files that I use across all different large language models there to mark down files which is essentially just a text file right

it's about every day AI and then about me my preferences how I work all of that good stuff my brand voice all of that is in these two files I keep them updated constantly so then I can at any point you know use them they're in my Google Drive so I can connect dynamically etc.

So I said based on the attached files please carefully go through my day to day workflow understand what chat GPT skills is capable of and briefly suggest that 10 most helpful skills I should implement and how they'll save me time you could also just say hey based on you know your memories about me and my chat history same thing because chat GPT AI systems are so good at knowing things about your own personal work style that you might not even know about yourself.

So I say when you're trying to figure out what skills to start with see where you're going wrong or what you're constantly using chat GPT for or what your ultimate you know deliverable or artifact is because then you can kind of reverse the process and start with what you actually need not just what others are doing.

Alright so I'm going down here and we're going to pick one so there's the daily AI right I'm not going to read all 10 but it gave me the daily AI research brief builder the Jordan hot take extractor excuse me got a cough.

Oh fantastic I've been six since November more or less if I sound nasally yeah I've just been sick for months alright Jordan hot take extractor I kind of like that one alright there's a lot of other ones i'm just going to use this one and I'm going to say

number two alright so give me 10 suggestions all I have to do is say let's build number two it's probably going to go through and come up with some clarifying questions which is good.

Alright so it's asking input what will I usually give it I'm going to say podcast transcript alright then I'm going to say the output what should the output produce every time so I'm going to say it's saying five to 10 Jordan style hot takes three episode angle titles five i'm just going to say all of those right and then three where should I pull the context from.

Should this skill work only from the pasted uploaded text or also search your connected so I'm going to say only from the pasted uploaded text.

Alright so simple enough here i'm using the skill creator and again you can look at the bottom in the prompt input box it's highlighted the skill creator but even if you just say help me turn this into a skill.

So you know one thing aside from going through this process that i'm showing you right now another great example is go look at a recent chat that you had with chat to be tea there was a lot of back and forth but you finally got something just the way you wanted hopefully you went through the prime prompt polish and refine to right because then you got a much better output so all of our people in our inner circle probably went through and did that.

Oh excuse me again there we go yeah keep muting my mic so much it's it's unedited unscripted y'all this is real alright.

So go through that chat that you went through and you finally got a great output and then just reverse engineer it and say I want to turn this into a skill outline every single correction mistake pivot everything we went through it.

Everything we went through in turn this into a skill right so at any point you can just click the backslash button and then start typing skills and then go to the skill creator.

Alright so this is probably going to take a couple of minutes to build alright i'm not just going to.

Keep blabbing on so again instead i'm going to pivot here a little bit and go into my clawed account.

So the great thing this uses the ancient skills open standard so what that means as well skills kind of work anywhere right so you know you got to tip your cap to anthropic between.

You know mcp the model context protocol agent skills a lot of things that they've kind of innovated and have helped make the AI community at large better so I now am in my clawed account so if you want to know where this is it's they just moved it kind of recently so it's on the left hand side go to customize skills and then you can choose your different skills there.

In the upper right hand corner I selected AI researcher alright and i'm going to download it so you can click the three little dots in the upper right hand corner go into download so now i'm going to go back into.

I'm just going to click new skill i'm going to say upload from my computer and then i'm going to go ahead and upload.

That one from claw that I just did in within a second or two it says skill uploaded pretty pretty simple right.

So now i'm going to go ahead there it is AI researcher so at any point you can click on a skill even the open AI skill.

And you can see exactly how it's set up you can read it right so for the skill creator as an example here's the skill markdown file here's the references folder with the difference files that are in there the scripts the different python scripts the license text so like I said in the same way.

You know if you do any coding right obviously you probably understand this but even if you know if you ever downloaded a program in your computer and there's all these different files and folders and license tax right it's kind of like that you are literally taking and bundling up your company's knowledge your files you know different things different access points and putting them all into a essentially an executable skill folder that then open AI and traffic and others can use.

Alright so on this skill section there is a nice little shortcut you can hover over any of these skills and then you get the option to edit them but you can also click the little chat icon and then i'll just start a new skill right away so i'm not even to do anything here i'm just going to say i'm going to say give me 10.

i'm going to say give me the top 10 alright that's all i'm saying so again not having to go through you know refine all of those things it's going to go through.

Alright so when I was trying this earlier it actually did a little bit better job I think it was because I was in the extended the extended thinking i'm going to try this again alright i'm going to say alright.

Load my skill up there and i'm just going to say top 10 stores.

We'll see if it comes back with clarifying questions.

There we go so now it's using the skill so I don't have to go in and tell it the different things that I want so you know let's just take a quick look at this skill that I have.

So this skill I can go in and edit it so the AI searcher skill.

Okay interesting so yeah sometimes things don't work well so even though the skill is working I can't go in and edit it for some reason that's interesting so i'm going to go into the skill creator.

Or now i'm going to go into my weekly triage and edit it alright so this is a different one that I created so in this instance I have it the description is it triage is the users upcoming week by reading Gmail and Google calendar identifying important meetings and commitment driven driving emails doing lightweight internet research to fill context gaps and producing a one page weekly plan plus a scored backlog and recommended time blocks so in this instance.

I can go through and just change these things very simply right it's a word doc I can go in if something's not working I can just edit it live from here right and the good thing like I said with skills they can access files and folders right over here in the files I can upload.

Different files and then have it reference those things I can go and change anything that I want to right there in the skill editor so it's very easy to manage and edit these skills.

Alright there we go and just like that it gave me my 10 stories so it went through the AI researcher skill which if I look at the clawed skill here right it searches for and presents the latest AI news from the past 24 hours focusing on large language model updates gen AI breakthroughs developments from AI companies like open AI and traffic Google met a Microsoft Apple and video Amazon Salesforce Adobe IBM etc right so I didn't have to go through it.

So I didn't have to go through and describe right it's a lot more than that I didn't have to go through and describe all these things what I wanted.

I just invoke that skill and I said top 10 stories and it knew all those things because I had technically be a clawed I had already taught it and I had gone through and made corrections and made updates and said here's how we want the format I want the format very simple very easy with a heading with date what happened why it matters that's it right so it went through and it did all that for me and this new.

AI researcher skill went through work correctly right i'm looking through yeah it got it got everything it got all of the most recent stories from the last day so did a great job.

Alright now let's see if my skill is done so to go back and remind you before we got slightly sidetracked that's what AI work on Wednesdays yeah we just do things live we bounce around we try to explain what's going on alright so remember.

I uploaded and I recommend you do this I uploaded these files about me or just say based on my chat history suggest 10 different things.

The one that I liked was kind of the Jordan hot takes extractor say the truth I actually use this a lot in cloth and i'll probably start using it a lot of chat you see a lot of times i'll have.

You know longer podcast episodes and i'm like wait I thought I had a pretty good take in there but I completely forgot what I said sometimes right this things unedited unscripted yes sometimes I have notes to help keep me on track a little bit but i'm like man I had a great point about ABC and how someone's asking me how do I find this right so I can run this automatically and just put them all into a file or folder and then I can more easily find them so it went through.

It created this skill right I gave it some feedback and then I go to the bottom and there we go it says the Jordan hot take extractor right so right now it's a draft.

I can click on it and then I can click install.

So very easy one click install like I said you don't have to know anything about mark down you don't know anything about yam all about Python nothing.

If you can go in and talk to chat to you be tea and approve some things iterate have a conversation if you can be creative and strategic you can start using skills in minutes alright then i'm going to go ahead and try and chat so here's what i'm going to do i'm not even going to give it any instructions right that's the whole point i'm going to go in.

On my my podcast episode here from the other day i'm just going to copy and paste this entire transcript let's see how it how it works here.

See what model i'll do standard thinking that's fine.

Right so literally nothing I said nothing I didn't have to click anything aside from once the skill is active.

That's it again think of the benefit of using standard operating procedures templates the concept of copy and paste right so now all these things that I might normally do in my day to day workflow.

I can turn all of them into individual skills I think the two biggest and best pieces of advice here as we wrap up our live demo portion and then i'm going to tell you I think what our five great skill examples.

Two big things number one go find those long conversations that you had with chat you've been where you had to do a lot of refining a lot of back and forth but you ultimately got.

The end deliverable exactly how you wanted it or needed it go back and turn that into a skill take your time in doing it right and then iterate use it once or twice look at the chain of thought update it.

Secondly do exactly what I just showed you right say hey based on my chat history based on my memories or just upload files about yourself based on all this recommend 10 different skills that could end up saving me time or help me produce.

Something more valuable to my clients my potential you know customers etc so i will see if this one worked now that I talked it up.

There we go alright so I pasted this long transcript and it said right here it said it used the Jordan hot take extractor skill alright I can go in and view that edit it download it right because now I can take this elsewhere if I wanted to but it did a good job so got my core stance here it got my ranked hot takes you know one of them was most AI layoffs are PR.

My second hot take there was Wall Street rewards AI layoffs absolutely right so a good way to kind of get my opinions or my hot takes straight out and then it got three additional episode angles so I wanted to do follow up episodes and then quoteable lines alright.

Hey this is that's not bad AI tools are the easy part getting people to use them for real work that's where companies fail I agree with that because I said it.

Alright so there you go now you know the easiest way to go in and start using skills immediately so let me quickly share three or no five that I think could be helpful.

Alright so one automated executive briefings so pulling in updates from connect connected company apps remember you can pull in information from multiple different apps and then you know auto triggering that to perfectly format your morning update without needing to manually select a GPT or go into a project and you know connect a bunch of documents number two budget verse actual explainer so pulling live data from connected spreadsheets to explain any variances in budgets.

Right so again versus saying uploading to documents going through explaining here's what I want you to do turn it into a skill third marketing performance summaries so drafting a weekly performance digest with insights and recommended actions and this allows you to combine multiple analytics apps into one flawless repeatable reporting workflow next here's a great one contract review summaries let's be honest not everyone has the same skill sets right that's why I think the example of templates are great.

Because think of like a PowerPoint template not everyone is a good designer but if you are a good designer you can give someone the ability to design something that looks fairly good right so in this example a contract review summary if your company has a strict process when it comes to legal review and you have all the documents you have the examples you have the SOPs well turn that into a skill because then you at least give people the ability to quickly understand maybe a contract or.

A service agreement or to be able to know where you can start to redline something without having to have all those skills and then last but not least automated operations reporting so that you know pulling in operational KPIs from sheets draft a weekly operations update and that can kind of function as a strict SOP ensuring that no section of the mandatory report is ever skipped or forgotten so again.

Think what do your people do over and over and over and maybe there's some GPT's that work great that you should probably turn into skills maybe there's GPT's that laughed a little bit that failed because it didn't have a certain feature or functionality that you now have within skills for projects right maybe there's something in projects but you're like it's a little too limited it didn't work really how we needed it to so now I think you have.

A new tool and sometimes it's not always the big release right it's not always going from you know GPT to 5 to GPT 5.5 that's going to move the needle sometimes it is these quote unquote smaller features that maybe you didn't even know about right that can really help your company or your department turn a corner in work smarter work more officially in hopefully even create more valuable outcomes.

That can really push your company forward alright was this one helpful y'all putting AI to work on Wednesday so yeah maybe you tune in once a week we did change things up a little bit FYI and I'll just explain that here quickly so Mondays we bring you the AI news that matters on Wednesdays we usually go deep with one new feature or if there is a big model release will do that and then on Fridays we're kind of starting this new thing called feature Fridays because what I realized it's very tough to choose that one thing to focus on on Wednesdays

and a lot of the most useful updates really just become a literal one second bullet point in our Monday podcast so that's kind of the lineup and then Tuesday Thursdays right we'll rotate the shows but new in a lot of the start here series and some guest interviews here in there as well so I hope this was helpful if so tell someone about it tell someone on your team and you're like yo we need to start using these skills I just broke down the easiest and the simplest way for you to start using these today give you a chance to do it.

Giving you and your company the right information on how to start using skills as reusable templates today so when you're done listening this and sharing this with your friends please if you're listening on the podcast please make sure to subscribe then go to your everyday AI dot com sign up for that free daily newsletter thanks for tuning in we'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI thanks y'all.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of everyday AI thanks for joining us if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and leave us a rating it helps keep us going for a little more AI magic visit your everyday AI dot com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.