Grok Bot Skills: What They Are, How to Add Them, and Which to Start With

A Grok Bot skill is a reusable set of instructions for a task. It holds the steps, the rules for making decisions, what the result should look like, and what the Bot must not do. Once a skill exists, any of your Bots can use it when you ask for it by name.

Skills, apps and routines

• An app connects a Bot to a service like Gmail, Slack or Notion.
• A skill tells a Bot how to do a job, usually with those apps.
• A routine tells one Bot when to run a job, on a schedule or when something happens.

An inbox Bot, for example, might use the Gmail app, follow a "morning triage" skill, and run it from a routine every weekday at 8am.

How to add a skill to Grok Bot

1. Open Connect apps in the sidebar. Packaged skills are listed there with the apps.
2. Find the skill and add it.
3. Ask your Bot to use it by name.

Your private skills are one library that all your Bots share. If a Bot cannot find a skill, open Connect apps, select the connected count next to the title, and turn the skill on for that Bot under Private skills.

How to create your own skill

The quickest way is to do a task with your Bot once, fix what it gets wrong, then ask it to save the process. For example: "Save the process we just used as a skill called Weekly account health." The Bot writes the skill from what you just did together.

You can also use Teach a task, which records you doing the job for up to ten minutes and turns it into a draft skill. Read the draft before you rely on it.

Good skills are specific. Say what to check, how to decide, what the output should look like, and what the Bot must never do without asking.

Sharing skills with your team

On desktop, open Connect apps, select the connected count, open the skill and choose Publish. Skills publish to your team only and need a description. Admins can turn publishing off, and skills that came from an app or a template cannot be published. For more on team setups, see Grok Bot for business.

Run skills on a schedule with routines

A routine tells one Bot when to run a skill. You set one up by asking the Bot in chat, for example: "Every weekday at 8:00 AM, run the Daily customer-risk skill." Routines use the time zone in Settings > Bot > Timezone, and schedules must be at least five minutes apart.

A routine can also start from a Slack message, an event in GitHub, Linear, Sentry or PagerDuty, an email to the Bot's own address, or a webhook from any other app. The webhook option has its own guide: Grok Bot webhooks. Each Bot can have up to 50 routines.

Where routine results go

When a routine runs, the result shows up in the Bot's chat. That works for a weekly report you read on Monday. It does not work when the routine finds something that needs you now, like a failed payment or an angry customer, at an hour when nobody is reading chat. And if the routine needs your approval, the request expires after 30 minutes.

Skills worth having

You can find packaged skills in Connect apps, and most of these take a few minutes to build yourself by saving a process.

1. A phone call skill (DoNotify)

DoNotify gives your Bots a way to call you. Add one line to any skill or routine, like "if anything is urgent, call me and say what it is," and your phone rings with the message read out. It can also schedule a call for later, and it works on a landline. Setup takes a few minutes on the AI agents page, and 14 calls are free.

2. Inbox triage

Sorts new email, drafts replies and flags what needs you. Pair it with the Gmail app and a morning routine.

3. Meeting prep and follow-up

Writes a short brief before each meeting from your calendar and past email, and drafts the follow-up afterwards.

4. Documents

Creates and edits documents, slides, spreadsheets and PDFs, so a Bot can turn its findings into something you can send.

5. Research digest

Searches the web on a topic and writes up what changed. It works well on a weekly routine.

6. Support triage

Reads new tickets, sorts them by urgency and drafts first replies.

7. Engineering issue triage

Groups new bug reports, links duplicates and flags the serious ones. A Sentry or Linear event can start it.

For more ideas, see Grok Bot use cases and the best Grok Bot plugins.