Walk into almost any small business before it opens and you'll find a laminated card taped up somewhere near the coffee maker or the back door. Alarm code first, then the safe, then the register. Which lights go on in which order. Who to call if the alarm company phones. Nobody remembers who wrote it, and the person who did may have left years ago. The card still runs the morning.
It's the most underrated document in the building. It covers one job, it fits on one side, and it lets whoever's on the schedule do that job the way the best person on the team would. The owner doesn't have to be there for the store to open right.
An AI skill is that card, written for an assistant instead of a new hire. It's a short set of written instructions for one job, saved where the AI can reach for it when that job comes up. Anthropic's own guidance for building them says Claude keeps only each skill's name and description on hand and reads the full instructions "only when the Skill becomes relevant." If you're moving custom GPTs over before OpenAI retires them, How to Migrate a Custom GPT to a Skill covers the mechanics, and Skills vs Projects vs Connectors vs Plugins sorts out what belongs in a skill at all. This post is about which cards your agency should write first.
How these eight were picked
Each one is tied to work your team already does by hand, most weeks, roughly the same way each time. That's the whole test. A job that comes up once a quarter isn't worth a card yet, and a job that's different every time isn't ready for one.
All eight are plain-English instructions with an example or two attached. Nobody has to write code, and the person who does the job today is usually the right one to write it down. Treat this as a starting list rather than a catalog. They're grouped by the kind of Digital Crew work they do: Scribe handles the admin, Coach readies people and checks the work, and Scout goes looking.
Scribe: the admin that eats the afternoon
1. Renewal outreach drafter. Give it the line of business, the renewal date and what changed, and it drafts the email and the text in your agency's voice. A personal auto renewal reads differently from a commercial package, so the skill carries a short section for each line you write, plus two or three of your best past messages as examples. It drafts. A producer reads it and sends it.
2. Meeting notes to your agency system. After a client call or an annual review, it turns rough notes or a transcript into the note your team would have written on a good day: what was discussed, what was decided, and what happens next with a name beside it, laid out to match the fields your people actually fill in. On its own it produces a clean note to paste. Paired with a connector to your agency management system, if your vendor offers one, it can file the note too.
3. Policy comparison summary. Side-by-side coverage for a prospect or a renewal, in the column order your producers already use, with the differences that matter pulled to the top. The skill holds your agency's standard closing line, the one telling the client the policy documents govern and to confirm details with the carrier, word for word, so it never goes missing on a busy Friday.
4. Social posts in your agency's voice. Your tone, the formats each platform wants and whatever disclaimers your carriers or FMO require, all on one card. Whoever posts that week starts from the same place, and anything Medicare-related arrives at skill number five as a cleaner first draft.
Coach: readying the team and checking the work
5. Medicare marketing copy reviewer. This is the one to build slowly. It reads a draft flyer, email or post against your compliance checklist, built from the rules your carriers and FMO give you, and flags every line that needs a human look, with the reason beside it. It never approves anything. The flag goes to a person, and that person's sign-off is the only one that counts. Write that limit into the skill in plain words so it can't drift.
6. Client intake checklist. A needs assessment for a new client, P&C or Medicare: the questions your best producer asks, in the order they ask them, and the follow-up each answer should trigger. It gets a newer producer through a first conversation without skipping the question that changes the quote.
7. Certificate and claims letter explainer. Clients call about a certificate of insurance or a claims letter because the document was written for underwriters, not for them. This skill turns the document in front of it into a plain-language explanation your account manager can send or read over the phone. It explains what the document says. It never tells a client whether a specific loss is covered. That call stays with a licensed person.
Scout: going looking before the meeting
8. Pre-review research brief. Before a renewal review or a prospect meeting, it pulls together what you already know: the account's history from your notes, what's changed since last year, open service items and, for a commercial account, what the business says about itself publicly. The producer walks in with one page instead of fifteen minutes of clicking between systems. That clicking is the Toggle Tax, and a good brief is one of the cheapest ways to stop paying it.
Two rules every one of them carries
Client data comes first. A skill is only the card, and it holds no client details, but the chat it runs in sees whatever gets pasted into it. If a skill touches anything with client health information, confirm that the plan you're using is covered by a business associate agreement before a single beneficiary's details go in. If it isn't, the skill works from what's left once those details are out. What Google's HIPAA Coverage for Gemini Actually Means for Insurance Agents and Is Your AI Notetaker HIPAA Compliant? walk through the questions to ask.
The second rule is ownership. Every skill gets a person who answers for it and one decision it never makes. The renewal drafter never sends. The reviewer never approves. The explainer never decides coverage. Write the decision into the card, put a name beside it, and the skill stays a help instead of becoming a quiet liability.
Where to start
Don't build all eight this month. Pick the one your team grumbles about most, and start with the person who does that job today.
You don't have to write the card from a blank page, either. Open your AI tool, tell it which of these skills you want to build, and give it everything you can about how the job gets done now: the steps, the systems it touches, what a good result looks like and where it usually goes wrong. Paste in two of your best past examples. Then tell it to ask you questions, one at a time, before it writes anything. That last instruction does most of the work. It's one of the two Flight Rules every crew member carries: it never guesses what you meant, it asks. Answer the questions, let it draft the skill, and have the person who does the job read the draft before anyone relies on it.
Most of these take an afternoon, and the first version will be rough. I once spent a couple of hours building what was supposed to be a smart agent in Zapier, watched it turn into a more and more tangled automation, and abandoned it. Rough is fine. Start small enough that rough is still useful.
The first GPT I built did one thing. I'd been spending two hours a show researching podcast guests and writing questions, and I dreaded it enough to leave it until the last minute every time. Once that GPT was set up and refined, prep took twenty minutes, and I could batch a whole week of it on Monday afternoon. There was nothing clever about it. It was a job I did every week, written down well enough that something else could do the first pass.
That's the bar for your agency's first skill. If you're not sure which job clears it, a one-week time audit usually makes the answer obvious by Wednesday.
If you'd rather build that first one with someone beside you, a Crew Launch is set up for exactly that. Your team takes a short survey on where the hours go, we spend one live session getting everyone working in the AI tool you've chosen, and in the second session we build your first crew member on the job you picked, with the person who'll own it in the room. See how a Crew Launch works.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to know how to code to build these? No. All eight are written instructions with examples attached. A skill can also carry scripts for technical jobs, but nothing on this list needs one.
Which AI tools support skills? Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all offer skills on at least some of their plans, and which plans keeps moving. If you're on ChatGPT Plus, Your Custom GPT Options After December 11 sorts out what applies to you.
Can one skill handle several of these jobs? Keep it to one job per skill. The AI chooses a skill from its short description, and Anthropic's guidance asks that the description say both what the skill does and when to use it. A skill that tries to cover renewals and claims letters gets picked at the wrong moment.
Who should write each skill? The person who does the job best today, with the AI interviewing them and whoever owns the outcome reading the result before anyone relies on it. The work is mostly getting what's in their head onto the card.
The Skills series
Every post in the series on custom GPTs, Gems and skills, in the order it ran.
- OpenAI Is Retiring Custom GPTs. Here's the Official Record.
- How to Migrate a Custom GPT to a Skill (ChatGPT or Claude)
- On ChatGPT Plus? Your Custom GPT Options After December 11
- Skills vs Projects vs Connectors vs Plugins, Explained for Agency Owners
- 8 AI Skills Every Insurance Agency Should Build First (you're here)
- Your Medicare AI Prompts Are Still Running Last Year's Rules
- Before You Install That AI Skill, Run This Checklist
- Google Is Retiring Gemini Gems. Here's What Moves to Skills, and When.
