Gemini's Gems go away from November, and skills cannot use Canvas or Deep Research yet
Google is removing Gems from the Gemini app, and it has put three dates on it: November 2026 for personal Google accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit accounts, and June 2027 for Workspace education accounts. Their replacement, skills, does not yet work with Canvas or Deep Research, according to Google's support page.
Google's "Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber" title card, from the company's Gemini announcements in September. Image: Google
Nobody has to rebuild a Gem by hand. Google says it will "automatically migrate your Gems into skills when Gems go away", along with any supported files, though GitHub files are not supported in skills for now.
Opal turns off on November 17
Google gives no day of the month for the Gems removal itself. It has published one hard date, and that one belongs to Opal: Google's Opal FAQ says opal.google.com and "Gems made by Labs" turn off on November 17, 2026.
Opal workflows do not become skills. Google says the saved workflow files sit in the owner's Google Drive in an "Opal" folder and will not be deleted or touched, but the workflows stop running interactively after November 17, and getting the prompt text back after that means downloading those files and opening them in a plain text editor.
The code is archived at the same time. Google says the Breadboard and Opal ADK repositories on GitHub go read-only after November 17 while staying publicly readable under their open-source licences, and that hosted endpoints such as breadboard-ai.web.app switch off alongside opal.google.com.
What skills do now, and what they still cannot do
Skills went into Gemini chat globally on September 30, and Google says Workspace business, enterprise, nonprofit and education customers get them "in the coming weeks", with no date attached to that. A skill runs when you type a forward slash and its name in the prompt bar, and Google says the trigger character becomes "@" at some point.
Several tools that work inside a Gem do not work inside a skill. Google names Create video, Create music, Canvas, Deep Research and Guided learning among them, and says skills have no dedicated page listing the chats each one was used in, because a skill can be used in any chat at all.
The other limits are administrative. Skills can be created without limit but only 100 can be active at once, they are open to signed-in personal accounts over 18 with under-18 access "coming soon", and they run on all Google AI subscription tiers.
Google says the Gems features that are still missing, including sharing a skill with other people, adding files from Google Drive and adding notebooks from Gemini Notebook, arrive "in the coming weeks". What arrived on September 30 is reference files inside a skill, such as plain text documents, PDFs and images, the ability to stack several skills in one chat, and Gemini building a skill out of a chat and running it whenever a matching prompt turns up.
OpenAI is folding its own custom-assistant product into a general feature on a schedule of its own, and is retiring custom GPTs into plugins.
For anyone who leans on a Gem for work, the useful window closes in November. Google says the automatic migration happens when Gems go away, and anyone who wants it done sooner has to download each knowledge file individually and paste the Gem's name, description and instructions into a new skill.
