AI Skills are suddenly everywhere!

00:00 If you're working with any AI tool at the moment, you'll be coming across this idea of skills. If you're a co-pilot user, you'll see this popping up in PowerPoint. Choose skills in Excel. Here, choose plugins and skills. When you build an agent, now there's skills in preview. And when you work with co-work, you've got the option to customize and manage skills. So, what

00:24 are skills? What's going on? This is a complete tutorial for you if you are a user of Copilot and you're not a technical person. I'm going to help you understand what skills are, what the benefit is, and how you can use and build them for yourself. Let's get started. So, the core concept of a skill is that it is a repeatable set of instructions or a recipe of some kind

00:48 that you can give to your agent so that it does the same thing over and over again. In my family, I'm a little bit famous for making a strawberry cheesecake. Now, if I went out to everyone watching here and said, "Hey, make me a cheesecake." You might be able to find a recipe online. You might be able to figure it out for yourselves, but everyone would make something different. If you just ask an agent or ask an AI to do something for you, it's

01:14 using its general knowledge or what it can find on the web to do it in that way. But let's say I wanted you to make my cheesecake my exact way. Then the way that I would get you to do that is to give you the recipe. There would be a couple of parts to that recipe. The first thing is I would have a name for that recipe. Lisa's delicious strawberry cheesecake. I would have a description

01:37 of when you should choose that recipe as opposed to all of the other recipes that you might have. make this, use this recipe when you want to make a cheesecake using fresh strawberries and yogurt or whatever that looks like. And then I would have stepby-step instructions of all of the things you had to do. And then you could follow those instructions and replicate this

02:00 exact same thing. So skills for an agent are like recipes for a cook. The other way to think about this is it's like a handbook or a policy, standard operating policy. If you have a new employee and you say this is the way we do these things, use this policy when you need to follow these steps and this is how we want it done. So the idea of using these for your agent is incredibly valuable

02:25 and I hope you can start to see this because rather than going in every time and writing this out over and over again or just giving it a general prompt and asking it to figure it out from its general knowledge. If you have a way that you want something done repeatedly, consistently, especially if there's quite a lot to it, then the skill is how you write that standard operating

02:48 procedure or that recipe for your agent, package it up, and use it. Now, the other thing that is awesome about this is that this is not co-pilot specific. This is something that is a format that uses is used by all of the different agents. So, if you're using chat, GPT or Claude, you can use this as well. And what I'm showing you here, I'm showing you in the context of Copilot and across

03:11 multiple C-pilot experiences. You can use the same thing in those other tools. Or if you've got these skills going on in those other tools, you can bring them into Copilot. So let's take a look at a specific example here, which is something that I'm doing for a client project health check. So let's say I work with a list of client projects that come out of Excel. that comes out in