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The Digital Marketing Podcast
How to Create AI Skills: Build Reusable AI Workflows That Save Time
00:23:45
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Kieran Rogers.
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B
And I'm Daniel Rose.
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A
And in this episode we're discussing AI skills, what they are and how to use them.
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B
Okay. So AI skills are a repeatable way of doing something that you can currently use in ChatGPT in Claude. They can be done in Copilot at the moment, but it's a bit tricky. You have to do it programmatically if you're going to do it in Copilot. But I have spoken to someone from Microsoft and they are coming in a much easier way very, very soon, literally in the coming months as well. So this is really nice way that suddenly you can create a skill and then you can go through. And we'll get into a bit more detail in a moment and you can say, use this skill to do this thing. But before we even get into this.
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A
Yeah.
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B
We should announce something. This is our 16 year anniversary episode. How long have you been podcasting? And it's like since before you were born.
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A
People out there like, have you not done it enough already? Have you not?
- [01:13]
B
Well, I remember our first episode. We were just looking at this now on our first episode, if I just go to Libsyn to have a look, was on social media tools to monitor your brand online on a budget. And Kieran reminded me we were in a hotel in Brighton. We'd hired out a room right at the top of the hotel. I think Susanna had. Susanna, managing director organized it. Yeah, she organized it for us. And Andy was with us. So Andy that I used to do the Internet marketing podcast with. So shout out to Andy and he was there and recorded this. And there was a picture of us all together, which I'm going to find and I'm going to put into the show notes. And you'll see us when we were younger. We still weren't young.
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A
I still were younger and teeth then.
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B
Yeah. That was quite a long time ago.
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A
You know what the thing that most impressed me that day? How, like, sheltered a life I live on the Isle of Wight. It's the first time I'd ever got to see and use one of those coffee, like, pod machines. The pod machines, yeah.
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B
That's how long ago it was.
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A
Now we have. We do podcast recordings and we had a pod machine.
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B
Yeah. And I remember saying to you, or you just reminded me that I'd said it to you, wouldn't it be great if we could just do this for a living? Yeah. And then I just. And I said, look, we kind of do now, but actually all we end up doing is doing in our spare time in between doing all the other crazy busy stuff that we're doing as well. But nonetheless, anyway, we're still here, so
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A
if you, we hope you're enjoying it and if you'd like to do something like give back in return, leave us a review, that would be amazing. We love to hear what you think about.
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B
I'll tell you two things they could do. Two things. You could leave us a review anywhere. But the other thing, subscribe on your preferred platform of choice. If you don't subscribe, please do so. It has a massive impact on the charts. So if you could just literally take that time to click the button and subscribe on your platform of listening choice, it makes a big difference to us. Also, if you've got any episodes that you listened to previously that you liked in our 16 year history, let us know which was your favorite episode. That'd be very good to you because I know some of you have been listening that entire time as well.
- [03:15]
A
There's another elephant in the room that we need to address. What's that? I've been absent for months.
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B
Do you know what? Yeah, he's been kidnapped. He's been. He's been taken away and Daniel hasn't mentioned. Maybe Daniel killed him eventually. Like I just. He'd had enough and he. He buried him somewhere. So. Yeah. Where have you been?
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A
I've been where I've always been. Really? Yeah, no, I. I'm very busy. Lots on work. Working with some amazing people and doing some hopefully amazing, amazing things.
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B
Well, you've got a new role which we won't go into the particular.
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A
I do like to. I don't like to talk.
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B
Sleep.
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A
Don't like to talk about it. But no, I'm working with an amazing brand, an incredible team and I've just met some of the most brilliant people and it's. It's kept me, kept me really busy. But that's not why I've been absent, Daniel. It's because you've been too busy.
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B
It has been very much like that. He's just turned it around and blamed it on me.
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A
I know, but. Yeah, but this is like, I think this particular recording. We've canceled this. Sorry, you.
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B
We've canceled it how many times? Six, I think. Quite possibly. Yeah, it's been a bit like that. Because you know what this is, you know, AI is supposed to save you time. Yeah, it's not saving me any time because everybody wants to do training on AI. And I shouldn't be moaning, really, because the business has been wonderfully successful because we are doing AI training in lots of big global brands that you'll all know. So it has been a very busy period. So it's been exciting.
- [04:35]
A
So Daniel doesn't know I'm doing this? He hasn't, he hasn't put me up to this at all. I attended one of Daniel's masterclasses on using AI. Honestly, I mean, I thought I knew how, how to use AI, but it was, it was an absolute revelation. Yeah, you sent me the recording and I spent, I spent my Saturday afternoon listening to it and I was absolutely glued and making notes. And honestly, guys, you, you may think you know about AI, but I, I put money on it. Mr. Raoz can teach you some really useful tricks. He certainly taught me a few and I was actually thanking you about it earlier, wasn't I? Yeah.
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B
If you go over to targetinternet.com if you sign up, there's a 3:30 day trial and as part of that third today, you can still access one of these master classes. You can cancel anytime in the 30 days. And every month we do two things. We've got the whole online library and certificates and skills benchmarking. But we've got one hour update sessions. So we do a live webinar where you can join and just get an update on any particular topic that we're covering at that time. But we're doing these half day master classes. They're kind of like three hours online. Loads of regular people attending as well, which is really nice because everyone chats and asks each other questions and gets advice from each other. But we're covering things like AI for automating, marketing, common marketing tasks, prompting techniques, not just AI as well, you know, social media, search, answering optimization, all those kind of topics as well. And we are again running one of our half price offers as well at the moment. So go target Internet.com and you can see all the pricing options on there. So yeah, please join up and get that 30 days free. Anyway, so thank you for putting that plug for me, Kieran. That was very little.
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A
Birth podcast, birthday gift.
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B
Yeah, I appreciate it.
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A
Some people get car, you got a plug.
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B
That's right. That's right. I'm happy with that. I'll take that. So let's get back to AI skills. I'm really, really excited about this because I think this is game changing because before you might have created like what we were calling before custom GPTs, it was like, you know, a reusable prompt. But this is actually, this is better.
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A
So give me an example. Like, I need all so many questions, I need all the details. Come on, let's build a beans.
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B
So I'll give you a couple. The classic one, which is probably what everyone should be doing, is you create a brand skill. So essentially what my brand skill has got is I've gone into it, I've created the skill, which we can talk about that in a moment, and I have given it a massive PDF from my branding agency that's got all of our brand guidelines in it, and I've dumped that in. I've also then pointed out a website and I have said when you create anything like a web asset or you create anything creative, follow these styling, follow these fonts, layouts, all those kind of things. Copy the css, the cascading style sheets from this particular website and then it creates a skill. And then what I can do is I can then go through and say, do this thing, but use this skill. Now what you'll find when you use the skills first of all is they're not perfect, so it'll do something, it's not quite on brand. So you say when I fix this, but also update the skill to reflect that. And that's the killer tip with this, because then the skill will get more and more robust over time. And it's got to the point now in my brand skill where I can build websites, I can get it, it's got my tone of voice for writing, it's got various other things in there, but essentially I get it to do it with the target Internet brand skill. And it does a perfect job of doing it. And that's writing, coding, creating, you know, visual assets, those kind of things. Give you another example, I could create a web artifact skill and that might have all of my CSS style sheet stuff in it, but it will also have usability guidelines in it, accessibility guidelines, stuff that it works across multiple devices, all these kind of things. And then I say create a website and use the web artifact skill and it will build it in that particular way. But the lovely thing is you can string these together so you can say, create me an interactive one page app that does this and use the target Internet brand skill and the web artifact skill, and it will do it in those things. And it's phenomenal because now if I create a dashboard, if I just go use the target inset brand skill, write an article, use the target inset brand skill, and it does it on brand, whether that's tone or Design or coding methodology or anything else. So the nice thing is you can then share them across your team. So once you created it and it's really robust, you then will just make sure if you do anything like this, use this skill and it will make sure that it does it to that standard each time and it follows them really well.
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A
Yeah, okay, so on that. So does that mean you need to be on a team edition to share a skill like that?
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B
Yeah, well, yes or no. So if you're the team edition, you can share with your colleagues. Yeah, but the thing is that when you create the skill, you kind of go for the process, which again we can talk about in a second. But what it's really doing is creating this skill file. And those skill files are portable. So what it means is that you can download it and then someone else could just upload it. So when you go to create a skill it says, you know, do you want to go for an interactively create it or do you want to upload a file and it's a particular file format and you can then that would. The great thing is you can then share. I could do it in Claude and I could put it into chat GPT. There's some slight differences in the files which we can talk about, but I can move them between and then I could then in future I could put into copilot as well.
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A
I've done a similar thing with projects where I'll create a project and give it all the assets and it's quite adaptable. But is this different to that?
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B
Yes, and I think this is what confuses people. Like what's an agent, what's a custom GPT? What's your project begin to tell you
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A
how confused I again.
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B
Right, right. Let me, let me talk you through my approach. First of all, there's not one perfect way of doing this, but if you think about like this projects is something where you have got a group of different prompts around a particular topic, but that's going to shift and change over time. Whereas when you pick an agent or what were custom GPTs but they're now moving that away, moving to agents and they are agents in co pilot as well. Is that is a reusable prompt. Right. So you've got one particular prompt and you don't want to kind of change it. To give me an example, that would
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A
that be like what would you use an agent for?
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B
Well, an agent can combine things. Right. So an agent can combine files, apps and skills.
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A
Right.
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B
So and then they've got a prompt so I'll give you an example. So if you go into Chat GPT and you're creating an agent, or you're going into Copilot to create an agent, you would go in, you'd say, here's your knowledge, I'll give you those files. Yeah, I want you to be able to use these tools. So in Copilot, that's going to be limited to the Office365 stuff to some extent. Whereas in ChatGPT you've got loads of different tools you can connect it to, but you can also say, and I want you to use these skills and then you can use skills. So you're. If you think about how you break the kind of. The way you're doing this up, a skill might be used in multiple agents, like a brand skill. You could imagine you could put it into loads of different places. So you can use a brand within a particular prompt. You could reference a brand within a project. Sorry, a skill within a project. But you could also reference a skill within an agent. So you can, you can do it differently. And it's quite an important thing to think about is like, how are you going to work now if you include it slightly different, because Claude doesn't have agents in quite the same way. But Claude is glad you said that,
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A
because I was thinking, how have I missed this?
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B
Yeah, but I haven't.
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A
Like, use Claude a lot.
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B
Yeah, so do I. So Claude has got projects, so you can group things into a project, you can use skills within those projects, but you can also set schedules. So you've got almost the same thing, but they're just approaching it slightly differently.
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A
I just feel naked because my Claude has no skills, because I've not given it anymore.
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B
But it has got some, there's some standard ones in there. And one of the main skills it has is a skills creator skill, just to make things that much more confusing. So basically if you go into ChatGPT or Claude and you say, either I would like to create a skill, or you go to customize and you go to Skills and it will say there's a little plus button and you can create a skill and it'll basically say what you want the skill to do and you describe it and then you can upload documents and you can. And it basically, it's creating a skill file which is to basically, like a markdown file is a particularly formatted bit of text and then that's movable between places.
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A
And does a skill make the AI like, more efficient? Like, one of the things I repeatedly Hit now are the, like the token limits. If you use stuff a lot, like if I'm, if I've got a lot of skill set up, does that help with that?
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B
It does to some extent because of the fact that you're not typing in a shed load of stuff every time. Like, otherwise you're going to have to describe your brand in great levels of detail and it's going to churn through that and it's going to start interpreting. Whereas if you've already got that set up, it's not going to use all that kind of processing tokens to do that. So it does make things more efficient, but it also, more importantly, it makes them repeatable. So, you know, you could be cutting and pasting in loads of prompts that you've saved each time, but the reality is because you can string these together, it suddenly becomes really useful. So I'll give you an example I have created and it took quite a long time to create this skill. A skill to create a piece of elearning. So, yeah, really, really like a lot of developers. So spend a lot of time prompting, get it to a point where, yes, I'm really happy this, I said, right now, turn this into a skill. So this is repeatable. So if you've got a really good prompt that you've been developing and you keep using the same conversation, the risk is you're gonna hit the limit of that conversation, that chat, and then you're gonna have to start again and you might lose half what you got. Whereas if you say, right, we've developed this thing, now please turn this into a skill. There you go, you've got that as a repeatable skill and you can call on that at any time. For me, this is the, probably the biggest thing that's happened in AI in the last year because it's completely changed how I've worked. Because once I work out, when did I miss this?
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A
When did this all happen? When did this all break?
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B
I'm gonna say three, four months ago.
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I've been really busy since then, so don't feel so.
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B
No, you've been crazy busy. That's why. But it's interesting because there's a couple other things going on in the background.
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A
It's like that, that old adage, isn't it? You teach a man to fish, right? Actually there are two answers that teach a man to fish and he'll bore you with fishing stories for the rest of your life. No, teach a man to fish and he'll, he'll never have to find Work to get food. Again, that's the actual attitude, isn't that? And I guess that's the same thing with skills.
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B
It is. And it just means also that if you're in an organization, you can make sure that your team are doing things consistently without them having to access a full agent.
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A
Yeah.
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Like, you know, rather than going off and saying, oh, you need to go and use this agent to do. It's actually no, you can just do whatever you're doing, but you just need to call upon these certain skills as well.
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A
So I could see like a skill effectively is just going to be like a text file of instructions in a way, right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
So. So I could see people like popping these on an intranet.
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B
A hundred percent.
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A
If you don't have a team edition, you could just literally just do that. And that could be part of your brand assets. So it's like people access the logo and the font and all that jazz.
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B
Yeah. So what you're doing is you're creating a skill MD file. Now ChatGPT and Claude do it slightly differently, but it's quite easy. So basically it's a, it's a markdown document. A markdown is just a way of writing text in a, in a fairly structured way. Now what I. This was fascinating. So they're normally in their own kind of subfolder and it's got a YAML front matter for metadata. And I was like, what on earth is YAML? And I looked it up.
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A
I feel like I need some of that in my life.
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B
Yeah, right. And it's now what it stands for. Bear with me, listeners, with this YAML. YAY Y A M L stands for. And it's a self referencing acronym.
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A
It's a Village People song. No, it's. No, it's just different.
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B
YAML ain't markup language.
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A
Okay.
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Of course, yeah. And then. But what it originally stood for is yet another markup language. It doesn't matter. But I like these kind of facts.
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A
I can tell you're a trainer because you get asked these things and you
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B
have to have answers. So basically what it's got is a core structure is it's got some metadata which literally just says what's the name of the skill? And then a literally two to four sentence description of what it does. And then in the body it's got a few things, it's got what's the goal? Or overview, so brief summary of what the purpose of the skill is. It's got the inputs or prerequisites. So it kind of defines what inputs, formats or files might be required for this to work. Then it's got the steps of the workflow, which is detailed number sequences of steps the agent must follow. It's got rules and constraints, so specific do's and don'ts. And then it's got output specification, so it defines what it should output. So when you're using that, that skills builder, it's essentially building this file for you and then you can call at any point and if it's not working as you intend it to, you say update the skill and it'll improve that file each time as well. So it's just a lovely way of working. And what we're going to do. If you go targetinternet.com forward/podcast in the show notes, we will upload our brand skill. Now, obviously you're not going to want to use our brand skill. Feel free to. I'd love it if everyone branded everything target Internet style, but more you can see the level of detail that goes into it. You can see the format of the file and you could, you could edit it and change it for your own stuff.
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A
What could possibly go wrong with this? Exactly. Please use it.
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B
Like everyone's just going to be destroying our brand half baked version of Target stuff everywhere. So yeah, we'll put a couple of examples in there for different things that we've built with it. Great. But once you get into this methodology of working, and I think everyone needs to do this a little bit, is think about when you just want to do a normal prompt, when you need a project, when do you need a skill and when might use an agent. And there's no absolute right and wrong answer to the way you do it. But if you think about it first, it means your whole working process will get slightly less confused. Now the other reason that's really important is that all of the large language models have started remembering things between questions, between chats to some extent. And if you've just got 50, you know, conversations in there, some are personal ones, some are business ones, it's kind of maybe learning the wrong stuff. So I'm really starting to prune what I've got and I'm deleting a load of my old rubbish conversations that I don't need anymore. I'm putting things into projects more or more of a structured way and I'm thinking quite carefully about what skills that I want to create. If you do that, it just makes the whole working process so much easier.
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A
It does. I mean, that's one of the challenges I Regularly face is working out which chats different things.
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B
Where did I talk about that thing?
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A
Yeah. Like your memory only goes so far and the other thing I found is actually if you've put a particular chat into a project, very smart thing to do and you're not in that project, when you ask for details on that, it just has no idea. Like it's like a different.
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B
They are separated. Yeah.
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A
On purpose.
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B
Yeah, exactly. So, so we talked about, look, if you're, if you're a member of Target Internet you get access to master classes. But we do these live update one hour sessions that everyone can access as well. You just need to be in use letter subscriber. So if you over target Internet.com Newsletter we have got an upcoming one hour session on skills where we're going to live build some of these as well. So get out there, sign up for the newsletter and then we'll send you notification of when we're doing that as well.
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A
I've got one more question.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Because you look like you're about to wrap things up but I, I like I've got so many questions, I need to ask one more. Like in terms of agents and, and skills and all this terminology, is that common across all different platforms? Like some people may be using Gemini, some people may be using copilot, some people may be using Claude, some people using Chat GPT. And this is, this is one of the really confusing things I find at the moment.
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B
Yeah. So what's happened is Chat GBT had custom GPTs and then they launched agents and as we understand custom GPTs will be disappearing. I think, you know, they're not going to do it for a while, but they are going to get rid of them. So now in ChatGPT and in Copilot you have agents and they are basically repeatable prompts that can have knowledge, can have skills and can access apps as well. So that's common in Gemini they're called gems just to make it slightly different. But that's it.
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A
The penny drops. This is. Yeah, okay.
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B
Okay. So. But also to make it a little bit more confusing, Chat GPT has agent mode and agent Mode is when ChatGPT can open its own browser window. But that's something kind of separate.
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A
Okay. I wish they wouldn't do this. It's like Betamax and VHS all over again.
- [20:55]
B
Yeah. And it gets very confusing then Skills, you've got skills include you've got skills in ChatGPT, you have got skills in Copilot. At the moment they're programmatic but they will be coming into the interface very soon as well. So they're unifying that. What seems to be happening is they're all kind of following each other's leads to try and make it a bit, a little bit more unified. Because if you edit an agent in Copilot or in Google Gemini, it looks almost exactly the same. So that the interface similar. So yes, mostly the language is common. The nice thing about skills is it's an open source kind of standard, as in it's one they've all decided to adopt, which means these skills are movable between different places. One quick warning on that is that Claude will create a skill and the description will be too long and it goes beyond the normal standard. When you try and cut it into ChatGPT, it won't work just because that silly reason. So what you can do is just make the description shorter. But I think this is nice and what I'm starting to see is people are putting these online as well, so you can kind of get other people's skills they've developed and it will shortcut you to doing things sometimes as well. The other thing, my advice on this, actually how I'd approach it, get AI to help you build a really robust prompt. So say I want to create a really robust prompt for doing a certain thing. It'll give you a prompt, run the prompt, test it, iterate it, improve it. Then when it's really good, say, please turn this into an agent. The other thing, rather than saying write me a prompt. Two other ways of approaching it is one, create me a rubric for doing something. So a rubric being like a marking scheme. So you could do a rubric for SEO analysis of web pages and it will give you. And then say right now turn this into a skill. Or I could go through and say, create me a methodology for doing something. And if you do that, it will come up a method of doing it and then say, right, turn that methodology into a prompt. Right, you've got a great prompt, then turn that into a skill. So think about developing amazing prompts and then you can turn them into skills. And that's when this starts to be really useful. And it means that you've got a whole library of these at your disposal for doing all the tasks that you do regularly. And it makes the whole thing a bit more streamlined. Okay, Kieran, any more questions? Beautiful.
- [23:09]
A
Just, I just think you've proven my point on how good your master classes are because we've had a little mini one here. Right.
- [23:14]
B
That's great.
- [23:15]
A
Been a mini masterclass from Daniel.
- [23:17]
B
Love it. Right, get over targetintert podcast for the show notes as ever. And I promise, Kieran, I'll stop canceling recordings. And I won't blame you for recordings not being done what you've been doing. No responsibility. Thank you for listening, everyone, and we'll see you next time on the Digital Marketing podcast. For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet. Com Podcast.