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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://ai-kb.automationanywhere.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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What are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows. At its core, a skill is a dataset containing a SKILL file. This file includes metadata (name and description, at minimum) and instructions that tell an agent how to perform a specific task. Skills can also bundle scripts, reference materials, templates, and other resources.

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Why Agent Skills?

Agents are increasingly capable, but often don’t have the context they need to do real work reliably. Skills solve this by packaging procedural knowledge and company-, team-, and user-specific context into portable, version-controlled folders that agents load on demand. This gives agents:

Domain Expertise

Capture specialized knowledge — from legal review processes to data analysis pipelines to presentation formatting — as reusable instructions and resources.

Repeatable Workflows

Turn multi-step tasks into consistent, auditable procedures.

Cross-Product Reuse

Build a skill once and use it across any skills-compatible agent.

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How do Agent Skills work?

Agents load skills through progressive disclosure, in three stages:
1

Discovery

At startup, agents load only the name and description of each available skill — just enough to know when it might be relevant.
2

Activation

When a task matches a skill’s description, the agent reads the full SKILL instructions into context.
3

Execution

The agent follows the instructions, optionally executing bundled code or loading referenced files as needed.
Skills also have four key behavioral properties:

Trigger-based

Skills activate when user messages match defined keywords or regex patterns.

Always-on

Some skills inject instructions into every conversation turn, regardless of the trigger.

Composable

Multiple skills can activate simultaneously to handle complex, multi-domain tasks.

Library

Install pre-built skills from the library or create your own custom skills.
Full instructions load only when a task calls for them, so agents can keep many skills on hand with only a small context footprint.

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Add Agent Skills to Your Agents!

Getting Started

Install the Skills Manager Toolkit and create your first custom skill.

Skills Library

Browse all pre-built skills available out of the box, organized by category.