While a number of Redditors spotted the Google banner on the Gems Manager page, I’m not seeing the banner in my own Gemini account. I’ve reached out to Google for more details.
As shown in screenshots posted on Reddit, the banner reads: “Starting November 17, 2026, we’ll automatically begin migrating your Gems to skills,” adding that users “will be able to use [their] Gems until they migrate.” A “Learn more” button leads to an empty Google support page.
Gemini Gems essentially let you create custom Gemini chatbots, complete with their own custom names and detailed instructions about what they should do and how they should act, plus upload files to use as knowledge bases. Once built, you can chat with a Gem as you would with Gemini, except your Gem can have its own abilities and personality.
Skills, on the other hand, are custom instructions for Gemini apps, namely Spark, the personal AI assistant that lives within a separate tab in the Gemini interface. Whereas Gems are launched within their own chatbot environment, Spark skills can be invoked during any Spark chat, typically starting with a “/”. Spark can also call a skill on its own if it determines the skill is relevant to a particular task at hand.
Besides invoking skills during Spark chats, you can also add skills to scheduled tasks, or even embed skills within other skills. Those skills can lead to some powerful automations, but they’re not exactly like the customized Gemini chatbots you could spin up using Gems, and it’s not clear exactly how migrated Gems will work once they become skills.
In another wrinkle, skills currently only work with Spark, which requires a paid Google AI subscription (such as Google AI Pro for $20 a month) while Gems are available to free Google users. It’s entirely possible that skills will become available in standard Gemini chats once November 17 rolls around, but we’re still awaiting more details.