Gems to be Retired in Favor of Skills
Google appears to be planning the retirement of Gems, a free customization layer in the Gemini web app, on October 20. According to a notice behind a feature flag in the app, users are advised to save their data and may later be able to rebuild their Gems as skills. The wording suggests that skills will become broadly available by then.
Gems are currently free for everyone and reside in the Gemini sidebar, while skills require a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription and live inside Gemini Spark. This would move the free customization layer behind a paid agent product with region limitations.
The reaction to this potential change has been sharp among Korean users who have built large Gem libraries. A manual rebuild of each one may be necessary for heavy users, as no automated migration is implied. Google likely has tooling planned, but rivals already offer reusable instruction files in minutes.
The retirement of Gems would also affect Enterprise customers, who use the feature grounded in Drive and Gmail. Skills do not support work or school accounts at all, making any deadline for this group a migration project rather than a settings change.