"Anthropic's new 'Skills' feature lets Claude autonomously perform structured tasks, another sign that AI agents are moving beyond chat and into action. Model builders are moving beyond simple AI chatbots to creating comprehensive assistants that, in the words of AI dignitary Ethan Mollick, " do real work " in enterprise workflows. Anthropic is continuing its push in this area with a new feature, Agent Skills, which allows Claude to improve its execution of specific tasks. When relevant, the model can automatically access folders containing specific instructions, scripts, and other resources, then act on them with human approval."
""Think of Skills as custom onboarding materials that let you package expertise, making Claude a specialist on what matters most to you," Anthropic said in its announcement. Use Anthropic's, or build your own Skills Anthropic has provided four pre-built agent Skills: Microsoft Word: To create documents, edit content, or format text; PDF: To build formatted PDF documents and reports; Microsoft PowerPoint: To craft presentations, analyze content, and edit slides; Microsoft Excel: To generate spreadsheets, analyze data, and generate reports with charts."
"Users can also build their own skills for Claude and use them across Claude apps, Code, and API. Claude automatically invokes the relevant skills when performing a task, without manual human intervention; for auditability, it provides its chain of thought (CoT) reasoning. When building new Skills, human users get guidance from an AI "skill-creator" . Claude will ask about the workflow, build out a folder structure, format files, and bundle resources. Then, when performing a task, it will scan available skills, identify relevant matches, and load the minimum information it needs to quickly and efficiently do the job."
Anthropic's Agent Skills let Claude access folders of instructions, scripts, and resources to execute structured tasks with human approval when needed. Four pre-built skills support Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel workflows for document creation, formatting, presentations, and data analysis. Users can create, customize, version, and deploy their own skills across Claude apps, Code, and API. Claude automatically selects and invokes relevant skills, provides chain-of-thought reasoning for auditability, and loads only the minimum necessary information. An AI skill-creator assists users with workflow definition, folder structure, and resource bundling to accelerate deployment.
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