Google is discontinuing Gemini Gems and replacing them with Skills — Gems move to Settings on 17 November, removed for personal accounts that month

One significant item tonight: Google is retiring Gemini Gems, its custom-instruction assistants, in favour of Skills. Gems move to the Settings panel of the Gemini app on 17 November 2026, then are removed on a phased schedule — personal accounts in November 2026, Workspace business/enterprise no sooner than 1 March 2027, education no sooner than 1 June 2027. Existing Gems auto-migrate to Skills. A note on dates some outlets got wrong, plus the week's board.

A quiet night on the monitored sources — one genuinely significant item, verified against Google’s own pages.

New: Google is discontinuing Gemini Gems, replacing them with Skills — Gems move to Settings 17 November 2026

Google is retiring Gemini Gems — the saved, reusable custom-instruction assistants in the Gemini app and the Workspace side panel — and replacing them with Skills, reusable instructions built on the open, Markdown-native SKILL.md standard. Per Google’s Workspace Updates post (30 September 2026) and the Gemini Apps Help Center:

Skills rolled out in Workspace on 5 October and in the Gemini app on 13 October.
On 17 November 2026, Gems move to the Settings panel of the Gemini app — still usable there.
Gems are then removed: personal accounts in November 2026, Workspace business/enterprise no sooner than 1 March 2027, education no sooner than 1 June 2027 (when “Ask a Gem” steps in Workspace Studio flows also stop working).

Google says existing Gems are automatically migrated to draft Skills, so the underlying instructions should survive — what goes away is the Gems surface itself. If you depend on a shared or linked Gem, or the Ask-a-Gem step in Workspace Studio, recreate those as Skills before your account’s removal date.

One correction worth flagging, because we nearly inherited it: several outlets reported 13 October as the day you could no longer create or edit Gems. That is wrong — in Google’s own post, 13 October is only the date Skills start rolling out in the Gemini app. We’ve dated the entry from the primary.

Also coming due

Re-verified against their primary sources tonight, dates unchanged: Cloudflare Zero Trust route endpoints (5 Oct — tomorrow), EWS worldwide allow-list enforcement (10 Oct; Microsoft’s docs confirm EWS begins disabling in October 2026 and is fully disabled April 2027), Windows 11 24H2 end of servicing (13 Oct) alongside Reddit RSS feeds ending (13 Oct), Cloudflare Workers KV legacy API (15 Oct), Minimus shutdown (22 Oct), OpenAI GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 / o1 / o3 (23 Oct), Kubernetes 1.34 (27 Oct), Consul 1.22 and Alpine 3.21 (31 Oct / 1 Nov). Full board with live countdowns on the calendar.