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ZDNET Highlights
- Anthropic Skills was released in October.
- With this feature, the cloud can be taught to perform repetitive tasks.
- The update includes new partners, a new open standard, and more.
Anthropic has differentiated itself from competitors by remaining laser-focused on its enterprise customers with offerings that make the lives of working professionals easier. The Skills feature, launched in October, aimed to do just that, and has now received an upgrade, making it easier for organizations to take advantage.
With the Skills feature, users can provide the cloud with a set of instructions, including resources like brand guidelines, so that the chatbot can refer to them when performing specific tasks autonomously. Since launching, the company has incorporated feedback and is now incorporating it into this new wave of updates, including improved collaboration.
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Perhaps the biggest announcement is that Anthropic is launching its Agent Skills specification as an open standard. Similar to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard launched by Anthropic to seamlessly and securely connect AI assistants and agents to data systems, the Agent Skills open standard makes it easy to share and deploy skills with everyone.
In the same spirit of increased collaboration, skills created can now be managed centrally, allowing team and enterprise administrators to more easily distribute skills and control whether they are available by default or opt-in to users. Ideally, this allows an organization’s employees to access all the necessary skills in one place, opening up new collaboration opportunities, as well as giving administrators more control.
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Other simple updates include easier access to skills, now living in the tool sidebar, with what Anthropic describes as a “quick-build flow—just describe what you want, and the cloud builds it.” Finally, it includes a Partner Skills Directory, which serves as a hub for pre-built skills created by companies like Canva, Notion, Figma, Zapier, Atlassian, Cloudflare, Stripe, and others. Ultimately, this should help teams identify and develop skills.
To help conceptualize the feature’s value, Anthropic provided examples of how it is being used by companies. These include enforcing brand style guidelines, creating org email templates, and creating tasks that follow team traditions, such as creating tasks in Asana, Jira, and other tools. For personal workflows, some examples include building personal skills for PDF manipulation, such as converting formats, and prototype deployment, such as creating a Slack bot.
