Skills become the unit of agent packaging and governance
Reusable skills become the way vendors package agent capability and the thing administrators scan, approve and distribute.
The pattern so far
Skills started as a convenience in July 2026, with Marketo and AJO B2B packaging AI skills. In August three vendors in eight days began to treat them as artefacts to scan, approve and share, and Salesforce made more than a hundred agent skills GA. In September skills became the way a CRM vendor ships into an AI assistant, and the way an organisation's plugins reach every user.
Trajectory
Month by month
- Confirmed Reconstructed
Salesforce shipped into Claude as a package of 37 sales skills, first as Claudeforce and then as Salesforce in Claude with a Claude Code plug-in of more than 40 skills, and Claude Desktop began delivering skills from an organisation's plugins to Chat users. The two Salesforce entries count as one source.
- Confirmed Reconstructed
Skills became the unit of governance at three vendors in eight days: Anthropic added security scanning for skills and plugins, Gemini Enterprise made custom skills GA with sharing under admin control, and Treasure AI defined its Work Folder Actions as work folder skills. Salesforce made more than a hundred Agent Skills GA in Headless 360.
Before it became a pattern
Early sightings that did not yet pass the entry rule on their own.