Summary
A "Skill" is a saved, reusable procedure you teach Planhat's AI once, so it works the same way every time
Skills are for multi-step processes that have an established method. For example: preparing a meeting brief, a renewal review, or a QBR pack, etc. - where you'd otherwise re-explain your process in every AI chat
Planhat OS comes with two built-in Skills:
meeting-prepandwrite-skillYou create a new custom Skill by asking Planhat AI in Sessions. It interviews you, drafts the Skill, shows you the draft, and saves it once you confirm
Skills you create are private to you by default. You can optionally share them with the other Users in your tenant
Run a Skill by typing
/in a Session and picking it from the dropdown menu, or by typing the skill name. Planhat AI can also load one itself as appropriate
Who is this article for?
Anyone who would like to learn about Planhat's Skills
It's particularly relevant for Planhat Users who may repeat the same structured work (e.g. CSMs regularly running the same types of meeting)
It's also relevant to managers who want everyone running the same process, and to Planhat Admins (e.g. Ops) who set things up in their tenant for their organization
Article contents
Introduction
Most structured work has a right way of doing it, and that way often lives in someone's head.
For example, let's say Miriam Blanc is a Customer Success Manager (CSM), and she runs a renewal review the same way every time: she checks the account's (i.e. the Company's) Health Scores, sees if there are any open Issues, checks what was promised at the last review, looks at seat (license) utilization against the contract, and then writes it up in a fixed format her manager expects. If she does all this manually, by herself, it's quite a laborious process. If someone else needs to do the task, it would take her twenty minutes to explain all the process details to the colleague. Even if she decides to use a generic AI assistant to help her, she finds she keeps having to use a long prompt and try to remember all the detailed instructions to give the AI.
Fortunately, with a "Skill" in Planhat Sessions, she only needs to explains it once. She tells Planhat's AI what her renewal review involves; Planhat drafts a Skill called renewal-review, shows her the draft, and saves it when she confirms. From then on, she types /renewal-review in a Session and the AI follows her process - including the parts she might sometimes forget to mention.
If her whole team should run renewals that way, she shares the Skill with her tenant, and everyone gets the same procedure.
What are Skills?
A "Skill" is a saved procedure - a set of instructions in your own words - that Planhat's AI loads and follows when it starts a task that the Skill covers, when you're chatting with it in Sessions. It's how you teach Planhat AI your way of working once, instead of explaining it in every Session. (You can refer to our separate article for more general information on Sessions.)
The two screenshots below show examples of using a custom Skill when chatting with Planhat AI within a Session. With the first one, the Skill is called indirectly (so Planhat applies it automatically); in the second example, it's specifically referenced by the User (in the orange text).
Each Skill has three component parts:
A "name"
Skill names must be lowercase, start with a letter, and use only letters, numbers and hyphens. While
renewal-reviewwould be acceptable,Renewal Reviewandrenewal_reviewwouldn't meet the criteriaTwo Users can each separately have a Skill called e.g.
renewal-reviewwithout clashing; names only need to be unique per personUp to 64 characters
A "description"
This defines when the Skill should be used, and briefly what it does
This is what the AI reads to decide whether a Skill applies, and it's also what you can see in the Skills list
Up to 200 characters
The "content"
The procedure itself - the process steps
Up to 16,000 characters
Each Skill belongs to the User who created/saved it. Skills start as private to the creator as default, but can be shared with all Users in your tenant (your organization's Planhat environment).
Built-in Skills
There are two Planhat default/standard/system Skills that every User has access to:
Skill | What it does |
| Prepares briefing notes for an upcoming customer/prospect meeting - it determines which meeting to prepare for, gathers key Company details, looks at which End Users are attending the meeting, and writes a structured brief |
| Creates a new Skill. Planhat AI uses this when you ask it to save something as a Skill |
📌 Important to note
Built-in Skills can't be edited.
It is possible to create/save your own Skill with the same name as a built-in one - e.g. meeting-prep. In that case, yours will be used in your own Sessions with Planhat AI, without affecting the experience of any other Users in your tenant (your colleagues).
Viewing Skills
When you're in a Session, type a forward slash (/) to open the "Skill picker" - a dropdown list of all the Skills you have access to.
Click the image to view it enlarged
For each Skill, you can see where it came from - on the right it states "Built-in" if it's one of the standard Skills, or the name of the creator colleague if it's been shared with you (as shown in the example screenshot below). Skills you created yourself show no attribution (as shown in the screenshot above).
Selecting a Skill inserts it into your message as a "chip" (the orange text in the screenshot below), and you can carry on typing your request after it.
Why use Skills?
Three things a Skill gives you that a well-written prompt doesn't:
Less re-explaining. Any procedure with more than a handful of steps costs real time to describe. A Skill is that process documented and saved
Creates consistent outputs. A Skill can define the data to analyze and the format of the output - the content and how it's organized - so e.g. a brief that Planhat AI drafts for you on a Tuesday looks like the one you got last month, and like the one your colleague got
Spread good process. Let's say one person works out how a renewal review should go; sharing the Skill with your tenant (and therefore your organization) means everyone runs it that way. This is the practical version of encoding your team's best practice, rather than hoping it's absorbed
The built-in meeting-prep Skill is a useful illustration of the depth involved. It doesn't just say "summarise the account (Company)" - it determines which meeting you mean before starting the work, scales its effort to the stakes of the meeting (a full pass for an EBR or renewal; a short one for a routine check-in), cites the source of claims, treats absence of communication (a lack of customer conversations) as a finding worth reporting, and won't pad an agenda with hallucinated action items.
How to use an existing Skill
You have three different options, and they suit different use cases.
Select it from the "Skill picker" (/) menu
Type / in a Session, and select the desired Skill in the dropdown menu. You can add more information to your request before submitting it (shown in the second screenshot below), or simply submit it and start answering the questions you're then asked. This method is great when you're not sure of the exact name of a Skill.
Type it directly
Type a Skill name, such as /renewal-review, followed by a space. If you have typed a valid Skill name, it converts into a "chip" (the orange text) automatically. This method is best when you already know the name of the Skill you want to use.
Note that you can actually do a combination of the "Skill picker menu" and "type it directly" options, because just by beginning to type a Skill name it filters the Skills list for you, and then you can select from the list after you have narrowed it down in this way.
Let Planhat AI choose
Planhat AI can see the list of Skills available to you, as well as their descriptions, so when a task matches one, it loads it before starting the task. You don't have to invoke a Skill explicitly for it to be used.
📌 Important to note
That third behavior is why the description matters. Planhat decides whether to load a Skill by reading its description. A description saying when to use the Skill (e.g. "Run when the user asks to prepare a renewal review") gets it loaded at the right moment in the Session.
🚀 Tip - when multiple Skills share a name
If you and a colleague both have your own Skill called e.g.
renewal-review, if you personally type/renewal-review, your own Skill will load for youIf several colleagues have shared Skills with the same name, Planhat can't tell which one you want to use, so say who you want it from, e.g. "use Becky's renewal-review"
How to create a new Skill
You create a Skill by asking for one in a Session.
You can either select/reference the
/write-skillSkill directly ...
... or tell Planhat in a conversational way that you would like to create a Skill:
Planhat AI will "interview" you - i.e. ask for information. Expect it to ask what should trigger the Skill to be used, what the process steps are and in what order, and what the output should look like. It will also consider elements such as "traps": "do not"-type instructions for the AI
Click the image to view it enlarged
You will then be shown a draft with the proposed name, description and content. Review the draft, and ask for changes if you want them. Nothing is saved until you confirm
Click the image to view it enlarged
Confirm, and the Skill is saved. It's private to you, and immediately available to you in the
/picker
As described/shown above, the Skill is created from your own words, and the standard procedure is that this comes from an interview-style chat between you and Planhat AI, rather than you uploading a procedure file. However, if you already have a process recorded in a Planhat Document Page, it is possible to refer to this in your Skill-building chat, like in the example screenshot below.
Click the image to view it enlarged
What makes a good Skill
As a general rule, follow the guidelines listed below when creating a Skill. Planhat's own write-skill Skill follows these rules - and so it will help you follow these guidelines when you're adding a new Skill.
Do | Don't |
Ensure the description explains when to use the Skill | Only summarize what the Skill contains in the description |
State the steps in the order they happen | Leave the order implied |
Say what the output should be: include the format, audience, and evidence required | Assume the format is obvious |
Call out the decision points and what to do at each | Describe only the "happy path" |
Say what to do when data is thin or missing | Let the AI pad or invent |
Keep the wording concise | Write lengthy prose |
Use your own terminology | Use generic language your team doesn't use |
Other Skills actions
Sharing
A new Skill you create starts as private to you. Ask Planhat AI if you want to share it to everyone in your tenant and it will be available to the other Users in your organization, showing your name as the source in their Skills picker. Planhat won't widen a Skill's visibility on its own.
Editing
You can ask Planhat AI to change one of your Skills, and it updates in place. You can only edit Skills you own: you can't edit a built-in Skill, and you can't edit one a colleague shared with you.
Click the image to view it enlarged
Disabling
A Skill can be turned off without being deleted. A disabled Skill disappears from the picker (dropdown menu) and can't be loaded, but it's still there to re-enable. This is the safe option if you're unsure.
Deleting
You can delete a Skill you own. This is permanent and can't be undone, so Planhat will check with you first. You can't delete a built-in Skill, or a Skill someone shared with you. If a shared Skill shouldn't exist any more, its owner should remove it.
📌 Important to note
As shown in the examples above, Skills are managed entirely in Sessions, chatting with Planhat AI - there's no settings screen listing your Skills.
Using the / picker in Sessions is the quickest way to see everything currently available to you.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Q: What's the difference between a Skill and just writing a good prompt?
A: A Skill can be reused without needing to re-state all the instructions, and is more easily shareable
Q: Who can see my Skills?
A: A Skill you create is private by default; it's tenant-wide if you share it
Q: Can I edit a Skill someone shared with me?
A: No, you'll need to save your own version if you want to edit it yourself
Q: What happens if two people have a Skill with the same name?
A: If you and a colleague both have your own Skill called e.g.
renewal-review, if you personally type/renewal-review, your own Skill will load for you. If several colleagues have shared Skills with the same name, Planhat can't tell which one you want to use, so say who you want it from, e.g. "use Becky's renewal-review"
Q: How long can a Skill be?
A: 200-character description; 16,000-character content
Q: Can I get a deleted Skill back?
A: No. We recommend disabling instead of deleting, if you might want to use it in the future
Q: Can I see a list of my Skills?
A: In Sessions, use the
/picker, or ask Planhat in words (e.g. "Tell me what Skills I have available to me"). There isn't a separate settings screen
Q: Is there a limit on how many Skills I can have?
A: Not at this time
Q: Can I share a Skill with one person rather than everyone in my tenant?
A: No, not at this time
Q: Can an Automation or Agent use a Skill?
A: It's expected that this functionality will be added in future
Q: Does everyone have access to Skills?
A: Anyone who has access to Planhat AI in Sessions has access to create and use Skills