If there’s one thing humans universally hate, it’s reading documentation, and writing it is a close second. Now, luckily for us humans, agents love documentation. Writing, reading, they just can’t get enough. In fact, documentation is how you get your agents to do things the way you do things, the way your company does things. They just call it skills instead of documentation.

So let’s explore this concept. Say I want a sales report generated by my agent. Now, my sales agent here is connected to our CRM, Salesforce, Apollo, Gmail, the works. And I can ask it, “Can you generate a pipeline report?” Now, I have no idea what it’s going to do from here. It could, in fact, write out the first chapter of Harry Potter for all I know. What I hope it does, and checking in here it seems to be doing it correctly, is go to Salesforce, grab our pipeline information, send me an email and maybe a Slack message.

Now, when I say this, I have preferences here. I like my pipeline report differently from you and differently from everyone else. I want it sent to me in Slack, maybe with specific metrics. My agent here has no knowledge of these preferences. With skills, we can teach agents those things, those preferences, so it can execute them for us.

So back to the conversation, my agent now has the pipeline and I can start teaching it my preferences. First, I can say, “Identify deals with no movement in the last 30 days, highlight reps with low pipeline under 500K, and send me a structured message to the sales reporting channel and an email directly to me.” And it’s going to go ahead and execute all of these steps.

Now, while it’s doing that, it’s important to remember that agents have no memory. In this specific chat, it understands my preferences, but that won’t be the case in a new chat or any future chat. Skills are how agents can understand what you want them to do, to give them a sort of memory.

So now that we have the right procedure in this chat, we can build a skill so it can replicate it in future chats. And it’s really simple to build. All I have to do is just say, “Build a skill from this. So when I say generate a report, you execute all of these steps.” It’s going to go through and look through everything we’ve done in this chat and write down the whole process step by step in a reporting skill.

So now if I open a new chat and say, “Can you give me a pipeline report?” instead of going off and doing what it thinks it should do, first it’s going to read its skill, understand the steps that we want it to take, go to Salesforce, create the report we want it to be created, and send it to the right places. And we look and it’s done exactly that. That’s amazing. We’ve taught our agent reporting, our way of reporting.

Now, we’re not limited to one skill. Agents only read the skills that are relevant to what you’re asking. So having five, 10, 15, 30 skills is not an issue. Give your agent a skill on how your Salesforce is structured so it can be more efficient. A battle card skill so your sales team can understand your positioning against competitors. Add as many skills as your company has processes.

With skills, your agents go from AI trying to execute and understand what you mean, to being able to execute exactly how you would do things. So go out there and give your agents some skills.