Skills are how askROI learns your workflows

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Skills are how a general assistant becomes good at your specific work. Turn on one that fits something you do often, then ask for it by the result you want.

A general AI assistant is good at a little of everything and truly expert at nothing. Ask it to review a contract, profile a spreadsheet, or format a Word document, and the quality depends entirely on how well you describe the task that day.

Skills change that. A skill is focused expertise the assistant can pick up for a specific kind of work, so it already knows the right steps before you explain them.

What a skill is

A skill is a packaged set of instructions, and sometimes tools, for one job. When a skill is on, the assistant follows a tested workflow for that task instead of improvising from scratch.

A useful way to picture it: a skill is onboarding material for your assistant. It is the one-page "here is how we do this" guide you would hand a new hire, except the assistant reads it the moment a matching task arrives and ignores it the rest of the time. The design keeps skills scoped: the assistant can load the matching workflow when a request needs it instead of dragging every instruction into every answer.

The idea is not brand new, and that is a good sign. Amazon let people add skills to Alexa back in 2015. OpenAI let anyone build a custom GPT in 2023. Google added Gems in 2024 and later made them shareable. Anthropic introduced Agent Skills in October 2025 and later released the format as an open standard. What keeps improving is how little ceremony it takes: a skill today can be a plain set of instructions, not a coded app.

What it means for you

• Teach once, reuse forever. Capture how you like a job done, and the assistant does it that way every time, with no re-explaining.
• Consistency. The same readable summary, the same document format, the same checklist, every single time.
• No coding. You describe the work in plain language.

What askROI ships with

Open the Skills screen and you will find skills for common work:

• Documents: create and edit Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF files
• Data exploration: profile a dataset, summarize it, and flag quality issues
• Content review: score a draft for readability and tone
• Service skills that pair with integrations, like Figma, GitHub, and Slack

Switch any of them on or off from the same screen. Our aim is skills that do real work you would otherwise do by hand, not novelties.

Ask for the file you want

File skills are a good example of how this should feel. You do not need to say "use the PowerPoint skill" or "use the PDF skill." Ask for the deliverable the way you would ask a coworker: create a launch deck, write a scouting report, make it visual, give me a preview before I download it.

A polished Aster Grid launch deck preview created from a natural chat prompt

The same pattern works for a very different job. A sports scouting prompt can turn into a structured PDF report, with a file preview open right inside askROI.

A Brooklyn Nets scouting report PDF preview created from a natural chat prompt

Skills, integrations, and automations

These three features work together, and it helps to know the difference:

• Integrations connect your outside apps.
• Skills are the expert workflows the assistant runs.
• Automations put either of them on a schedule.

Some skills need an integration to work. A Slack skill, for example, is only useful once you have connected Slack.

How people use them

• "Turn this CSV into a clean summary with the key trends." (data exploration)
• "Review this blog draft and tell me where it is hard to read." (content review)
• "Build a one-page Word doc from these notes." (documents)
• "Read this PDF report and pull out the numbers that matter." (documents)

You rarely have to name the skill. You ask for the outcome, and the assistant uses the matching skill if it is turned on.

Build your own

You are not limited to what comes in the box. If you do a task the same way every time, the easiest way to make a custom skill is to tell askROI in chat. Say something like, "Create a skill for how I review monthly board decks," then describe the steps, examples, and standards you care about. askROI can help turn that workflow into a reusable skill.

The Skills screen is still there when you want to browse, manage, or install skills from GitHub. But creation does not have to start with settings. It can start with a normal message, the same way the work itself does.

One note on trust: custom skills are not reviewed, so only install custom skills from sources you trust.

Where this is going

The shape of this is a library. Across the industry, skills are becoming things you can share. Google lets people share Gems with Drive-like controls, and OpenAI's GPT Store holds millions of custom assistants. The same is happening inside teams. Instead of one assistant that tries to do everything at once, you get a growing shelf of focused experts you switch on when you need them, including ones you and your colleagues build yourselves. The assistant gets better not by getting bigger, but by reaching for the right skill.

How to use skills in askROI

1. Open the Skills screen.
2. Browse the available skills and turn on the ones that match your work.
3. Start a chat and ask for the outcome. The assistant uses the right skill automatically.
4. To make your own, just ask askROI in chat to create a skill for the workflow you want. You can also start that chat from the Skills screen.