If your team has a workflow they keep doing over and over, wouldn’t it be great if it was automated and reusable? What if the same workflow can be refined further, or even shared with others in the team?
Salesforce thought the same, and so they launched AI Skills in Agentforce Coworker.
What are AI Skills in Agentforce Coworker?
AI Skills are reusable sets of instructions that tell Coworker how to complete a repeatable task. If you’re familiar with using skills in Claude, you get the idea, as it works similarly. The task is defined once, and anyone with access can run it the same way each time. Salesforce says Coworker is the first Agentforce agent to include them.
These AI Skills seem to arrive as part of a wider Agentforce Coworker expansion, which also covers Microsoft Teams, mobile and desktop apps, and an MCP server. They were announced in pilot in September, with general availability planned for October.
If you’ve used Prompt Builder, you might think they’re similar in the sense of being “reusable”, but there’s a difference between the two. A prompt template gives you a repeatable way to prompt an LLM for a text output (like a sales email or a record summary), while a skill describes the whole task so an agent can work through each step and take action. You can pretty much say that AI Skills are more powerful.
What Can You Use Skills For?
Salesforce has its own examples on account research, meeting prep, case classification, and flagging renewal risk. As usual, case summaries are in the picture as well. In other words, this is work that people repeat often and usually do slightly differently each time.
Basically, if you have a “best person” (or, as Salesforce calls it, seasoned pros) in your team who handles something, that same handling habit can become a skill the whole team can run. This is useful for making sure best practice is always followed.
Governance and Control
Yes, I can hear the question already – if users can build and share skills, who’s keeping an eye on them?
So far, Salesforce says skills can be shared with your team and that you control who can access them. A skill is private until its creator decides to share it, and it runs as the person using it.
Because Coworker itself respects existing permissions, we can assume users only get answers from records and objects they already have access to. If it gives you more peace of mind, Coworker pauses for approval before it creates or updates a record.
Final Thoughts
Skills are an easy idea to like. In the simplest of words, write down how your best person does something, and let everyone run it.
The guardrails as Salesforce described them should ease some of the worry about governance and sharing of skills, but at the same time this can be pretty powerful stuff if your whole team can use them, so I’d like to see more on how exactly admins can maintain this.
Until then, I’d treat these AI Skills like any other new feature – in the meantime, stay tuned for a deep dive and walkthrough on how to use them properly!
