Skills are a way of extending AI by providing instructions on how to perform a task. This capability is now being added to AI in SharePoint giving us a great new way to extend the capability of AI specific to the tasks we do.

This video is a step by step guide demonstrating how to add a document review skill to a controlled documents library. The great news is you don’t need to be an expert in SharePoint, but it does help if you are the subject matter expert designing the skill. The site I use in the demo is outlined in my earlier blog on creating a controlled document system.

Skill files are created in the /Agent Assets library created in your site when the “Agent Assets” Site Collection Feature is activated.

Creating a Skill requires these 3 steps:

• Open AI Chat in your SharePoint Site or Library
• Type “create a skill to <describe the skill>
• Once you are done, ask AI to “save the skill”

Don’t forget to test the Skill to make sure it does what you are expecting. Just like everything with AI, you should never assume it will be perfect and it may take some additional human input.

You can tune the skill by adding additional details including the specific metadata column names you want to use, criteria that help determine if something is in scope or not and other details.

Skill files are Markdown format and can be created or edited manually or via the SharePoint AI chat. This makes it possible to create a Skill and copy the files to multiple sites, which might be useful for project sites or others where you have many sites built off the same template.

The use cases for skills are endless. Almost any task that involves reviewing content, tagging metadata, assigning actions etc can be done with a Skill.

Learn more about extending AI in SharePoint.