Transcription
Cloud Skills, or agent skills, are something everyone should know. And, frankly, there's a huge potential here. This is a watershed moment, just like MCP, in how we design AI or agent workflows. And not just within Cloud. Other models will likely adopt similar concepts. Therefore, in this video, I will explain what skills actually are, why this is another breakthrough, and most importantly, how you can start using them today to get results. And, of course, how to access Cloud Pro from Russia. Let's go. So, what are Cloud Skills? Actually, the official definition is very confusing. The simplest way to think about it is a menu of reusable instructions that teach Cloud how you want tasks to be performed, what tools to use, and what standards to follow, so that it's done automatically anytime, anywhere, when you need it. Before Cloud Skills, when you performed repetitive tasks, such as writing marketing emails consistent with your brand voice or process, you had to repeat the same instructions in every single chat. This is inconsistent and time-consuming. Now you might think, "Just use Cloud Project with custom instructions." Right? Yes, 100%, this is what most people are already doing. But there are still two fundamental limitations here. First, these instructions are not portable. Imagine that the next time you join another company, you'll have to either work within that specific project or repeat all the instructions from scratch. And second, they cannot be layered or combined. Imagine you have a specialized project for copywriting and another project for company analysis. You can't just combine them for a new task. They work in complete isolation, and therefore you have to create so many different projects, which can ultimately lead to interrupted workflows. And that's why the solution is Cloud Skills. Instead of embedding all these workflow and resource instructions within a project, you extract them and package them into what's called a fancy word, skills, and make them available at any account level, including the web app, Cloud Code, or Cloud IP. Once you understand this, you might have many types of custom menus. Perhaps a PC writing menu, a marketing research menu, a design template menu. And they can also be used all together. This is why it's a game-changer, as you now have much more flexibility and mobility of these skills for your workflow or agent design. Now, another big confusion between Skills, MCP, and Project. Someone might tell you, "Skills are just a way for Antropic to fix MCP problems." This is a big misconception. If you look at it through the lens of the Cloud ecosystem, Cloud is the brain itself, the core intelligence that makes decisions. Skills are the menu of instructions, the used instructions on how specific tasks should be performed. MCP provides the tools, the actual capabilities to do things beyond Cloud's knowledge, such as creating a file, writing code, or accessing a database. Project is a dedicated workspace where you can combine skills, MCP tools, and background knowledge for a specific ongoing task. This is what makes the Cloud ecosystem so powerful. You can mix and match components depending on what your specific workflow needs. Not every process needs all these components. They don't compete. They are building blocks, and they are designed to work together to build powerful workflows or agents. Essentially, there are three types of skills you can use with Cloud. For this demo video, I will use the Cloud web app. The first is official Skills from Antropic. These are ready-to-use skills built directly into Cloud. Just go to Settings, then to the Copyabilities section. Here you will control which capabilities Cloud will use in the chat. But first, you must ensure that Code Execution and File Creation are enabled to use skills. Then you will see a list of predefined skills. I do not recommend enabling them all at once. Just select the ones you will actually use, because too many skills can confuse Cloud when executing a workflow. Partner and Custom Skills. In addition to official skills created by Antropic, there are also skills created by Antropic partners, such as Notion. You can check the official GitHub repository and scroll down to Partner Skills, where you can download their skills and use them in Cloud. I will leave a link on my Telegram channel. And second, Custom Skills. These are your own creations. They can be your workflow instructions, a resource template, or even a code script. You prepare your own skill file according to the official format and activate them by uploading the skill file. You can also enable and use the official skill called Skill Creator to create your own skills if you are not a technical specialist. This is how you personalize Cloud to your work style. I will show you how to do this in literally a minute. Community-created skills. The third type is community-created skills. There is a growing ecosystem of skills created by other Cloud users. But you must be careful about security when using these community skills. And according to, once you enable skills, they should automatically trigger when contextually appropriate. But in my experience, Cloud may not always activate them as you expect. Therefore, my advice is also to add this to the custom instruction at the account level to ensure that Cloud will always consider relevant skills when generating a response. Now, an important point. Access to tools. To access Cloud from Russia, you will need a VPN. Without it, the service will not work. This is an important condition. In the description, I have left a link specifically to the seller from whom I personally bought Cloud Pro. He also has the Max version and other useful products. Everyone I recommend, I always pin on my Telegram channel. I really try to ensure that you have the opportunity to use the best foreign services, even with all the current blockages that are happening. And a small clarification regarding Perplexity. I no longer recommend promo codes. Now, for both Cloud and other services, we only use official subscriptions where the seller logs in and activates access directly to your account or creates a new one with an activated subscription. But if, by chance, your old version of Perplexity has stopped working, write to me, and I will tell you how to correctly contact the seller or the platform administration to resolve the issue. I have also left a link to my personal Telegram in the description under the video. Okay. Now let's try a simple example. Using the official Fame Factory skills that we just enabled. Let's say I'm creating a landing page for a new SaaS product called Power Stack. And I have some copy text. Now, just attach the text to Cloud and ask it to create a landing page layout using a beautiful theme. Note that I did not mention using any specific skills, but you can see that Cloud is now checking Factory skills automatically to select a beautiful theme. And this is thanks to the custom instruction at the account level that I have already set. So, in just a minute, the landing page is ready. Officially, Factory has 10 themes, and Cloud chose the Tage Innovation theme from the library. It looks quite cool and technological. With these simple skills, you can quickly apply ready-made styles to any documents you create, whether it's a landing page or a presentation. Let's try another example. This time, I will ask it to create a Word document with frequently asked questions about launching this product, which will be handed over to the internal team. This time, Cloud reads the built-in document creation skills and generates these well-formatted documents. It looks quite decent and complete, and you can see that Cloud has applied the same theme to this document as well. The only thing I don't like is that it didn't use the internal communication skills that I expected for composing these answers. This is a limitation of Cloud Skills; it relies heavily on context to activate relevant skills. Or you need to explicitly specify the skills in the chat. And what I like is that now I can simply either download the document or upload it to my Google Drive, which simplifies the task of sharing it with the team. Thus, using the official Factory or any other built-in skills that you have enabled, you can already quickly apply them in your workflow by providing the relevant context. And now you know how to use existing built-in skills. But you can also create new custom skills if there isn't one that meets your needs. The first method is extending existing skills. For example, I run a flower business, and my company has a branded presentation template. I want Cloud to use it every time it creates a new presentation. Now, just attach this presentation template and ask it to first read the official built-in skills for PowerPoint, and then create a new skill called Brand Deck that extends them. I highly recommend giving Cloud more context when creating new skills. When the skill should trigger, usage examples, any specific guidelines. And most importantly, ask it to reference parent skills to avoid duplication. And also use the official Skill Creator to ensure correct formatting. Then I save it as a ready-to-use ZIP file. So, now Cloud reads the parent skills and Skill Creator to understand the structure, and also analyzes my uploaded template to extract the relevant colors and fonts. And then the new skill is ready. It's in ZIP file format, and we can simply download it. To activate these custom skills, just go back to Settings, then to the Copyabilities section. And here you can upload the new skills that we have just created. And now this new skill is ready to be used everywhere. For example, I am creating a presentation with a business performance review for the third quarter. First, I upload sales data and a marketing research report. And ask Cloud to extract key insights from these resources. And in just a few minutes, we have this comprehensive executive brief. Both performance analyses are a real strength. Cloud provides this kind of strategic insight with summary tables. And now we are ready to create a presentation. We ask Cloud to create a branded company presentation based on these insights and the summary. Note that I emphasized the key phrase company brand to ensure that Cloud will use the Brand skill that we just created. So, it is now launching the Brand skills and understands the brand, guidelines, and presentation requirements, and then also reads the official PowerPoint skills. And here it creates presentations in just a few minutes, the branded presentation is ready. It looks quite good with all the thematic slides, and we can simply download it for double-checking. Cloud gets most things right. The theme and style look exactly like the company's presentation template. Although there are some minor issues with margins or layout that I have to adjust myself. Most of the content is correct and fits well into the layout. The complaint is that it didn't use any charts in the presentation, as I instructed, only a table. And whenever you find any issues when executing a theme or want to improve it, you can always give it back to Cloud, adjust the skills, and update them for you. Although it's not 100% perfect, frankly. I'm still pleasantly surprised because it's a complex topic with images and a heavy style, and compared to other AI models, Cloud is currently the only one truly capable of creating beautiful presentations like this within a single workflow. In the previous video about office, I showed how Google also makes presentations. Yes, also cool, but then I re-generated them using image generation in Google Slides to make them look good. For anyone who creates presentations on a topic in a specific style and isn't chasing super design, this is more than enough. And this method works not only for presentations, it works for documents, Excel spreadsheets, landing pages. It is fully scalable. You get the idea? You don't need to start from scratch when creating new skills. Try using any existing official skill first and build your skill on its basis. The second way is to transform any existing workflow that you already use and package it into new skills. And this is another quick result. For example, I have a custom Cloud Project for team reporting. This project specializes in extracting project tracker status from a Notion database and creating a custom dashboard. It already has very detailed custom instructions, the role, the tool to be used, workflow details, output format, as well as an output template in the resources. So, this is a really good scenario to package into a new skill. First, make sure you have already enabled the Notion MCP, then use this prompt to ask it to create a new skill called Notion Project Dashboard. It is very important to always first explore the available Notion MCP tools and determine which tools are actually needed for this specific workflow. The reason is that usually an MCP server can contain so many different tools, and you don't want these skills to load all possible tools that might not be needed. Then, again, include all this important context about these new skills, and then paste the full set of custom instructions with workflow details, and also upload the output template files. Instantly, the new skill is created and ready to be downloaded and activated. The magic here is that now I can simply ask Cloud to generate a project status dashboard from Notion in any new chat. And I don't need to be tied to any project. Cloud will now call the Notion MCP server and run the Notion Project Dashboard skill. For this task, the dashboard formatting style looks exactly like what I generated within that project. This means that now, using Cloud Skills, you can make any of your established workflows portable. And in combination with MCP, you can use them anywhere by interacting with Cloud. So, when do you really need skills or need to create new custom skills, ask yourself these three key questions. First, do you need to repeat the same instructions in different chats three or more times? Second. If you transfer this to a real-life situation, do you need to train a real person on this process or just a standard? Third. Is consistent quality or format required every time? If you have more than two points checked, the better. You should create a skill. Also, if you are on the Pro plan, the weekly usage limit can be a real pain. Create custom skills only for the most important and repetitive workflows to avoid token consumption or use other AI models to create skills for you. You can simply upload the official Skills Creation Chat GPT Perplexity file and ask it to study it and generate a new skill, including your requirements. This works 100%. And skills are static and may require maintenance, especially when they need to call an MCP tool function that may change over time. Therefore, you can ask Cloud to include what I call a Plan B, in case the tool call doesn't work, and try not to use too many MCP tools in one skill. Keep it simple. Be sure to try all these methods that I have mentioned and let me know how it works out for you. And give it a like if you enjoyed this video. Well, there's a lot more interesting content ahead. Thank you for watching this video to the end. Be sure to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the next episodes. They are already on their way. If you are interested in any specific topics for discussion, write about it in the comments. I read everything and reply personally. Also, join my Telegram channel. If you have a personal question for me, feel free to write in direct messages. I try to answer everyone. And an important announcement, very soon I will launch a project for training neural networks. There is a lot of material accumulated, and you have a lot of questions, so I am preparing something useful. All news will be on the Telegram channel. Also, in the description under this video, I have left links to where I myself purchase subscriptions. This was Ivan, from the channel Artificial Intelligence in Practice. See you in new videos. Bye everyone.