# Skills They Can Master

Teach any AI employee your own step-by-step process, from a blog-writing checklist to a lead-qualification script, and it follows those exact steps whenever a matching request comes in. Write it yourself in the Skills tab, or just describe your process in chat and the employee turns it into a skill. Skills load only when the task matches, so you can add as many as you want without slowing anything down.

The skill catalog is a library of pre-built capabilities organized by function: content writing, SEO optimization, lead qualification, customer support, data analysis, social media management, competitive research, and more. Each skill comes with a detailed prompt, recommended tools, quality criteria, and output format. Assign a skill to any employee and it immediately knows how to do that job.

When the catalog does not cover your specific workflow, create a custom skill. Define the steps the employee should follow, the tools it should use, the output it should produce, and the quality bar it should meet. A custom skill for "quarterly board deck preparation" might include pulling data from Salesforce, generating charts, writing executive summaries, and formatting everything in Google Slides.

Skills are reusable across employees. Create a skill once and assign it to every employee who needs it. Update the skill definition and every assigned employee uses the new version on their next task. This keeps your entire workforce consistent without retraining each individual.

## Pre-Built Skills for Common Business Workflows

Sistava includes a catalog of pre-built skills covering the most common business workflows: customer support, sales prospecting, content creation, data analysis, project management, research, and more. Assign any skill to an AI employee in one click, and it immediately knows how to handle that class of work.

Skills are not just labels. Each one includes specific knowledge, behavioral guidelines, and decision logic that shapes how the agent approaches work in that domain. Assigning a "Customer Support" skill to an agent changes how it handles tone, escalation, and response structure.

## Build Custom Skills for Your Specific Workflows

Pre-built skills cover the general case, but every company has workflows that are specific to its products, processes, and culture. Sistava lets you create custom skills from scratch, defining the knowledge, instructions, and behavior you need for your particular context.

A custom skill can encode your company's support playbook, your sales methodology, your content brand guidelines, or your internal process for handling escalations. The agent learns exactly how your company operates, not a generic approximation.

## Skills That Transfer Across Your Entire Workforce

Once a skill is created, it can be assigned to any AI employee on your team. Build a skill once and deploy it across every relevant agent in your workforce. Updates to a skill propagate to all agents that carry it, so maintaining consistency across a large team is manageable.

This is what makes scaling an AI workforce practical. You do not configure each agent from scratch. You build a skill library that captures your organization's knowledge and expertise, then distribute it across agents as needed.

## How It Works

**Pick from a catalog of pre-built skill templates or write your own to teach the agent exactly how you work.**

The skill catalog includes pre-built templates covering common professional capabilities: SEO writing, sprint planning, code review, customer outreach, competitive research, and more. Each template is ready to use or can be forked and edited to match your specific process. You can also write a skill from scratch using a simple structured editor.

Skills are portable. A skill you write for one agent can be assigned to another, shared across your team, and reused across organizations. When you invest in writing a high-quality process, every agent that gets that skill benefits from it. The more skills you build, the more capable your entire AI workforce becomes, no matter how many agents you have.

## Use Cases

### Finance team teaching an agent a proprietary analysis method

Define the skill with your own instructions and examples. The AI employee learns it and applies it consistently.

### Legal team training an agent on a unique contract review process

Encode your internal process as a custom skill. The AI agent follows it exactly, every time.

### Support team building a skill for a complex escalation workflow

Write the skill once and assign it. Every AI employee with that skill handles escalations the same way.

### Marketing team creating a skill for on-brand content generation

Define tone, structure, and rules as a custom skill. Every AI agent with it produces content that matches your standards.

## Comparison

| Before | After |
|---|---|
| You can only use skills someone else defined for a different use case. | Build custom skills that encode your exact process and expertise. |
| Proprietary methods get lost when employees leave. | Encode your best practices as reusable skills any AI agent can learn. |
| Training AI on unique workflows requires engineering resources. | Define custom skills through a simple interface, no code needed. |
| Each agent implements the same process differently. | Custom skills ensure every AI employee follows the same playbook. |

## FAQ

### What is a skill in Sistava?

A skill is a bundle of domain knowledge, behavioral instructions, and guidelines that shapes how an AI employee handles a particular type of work. Assigning a skill to an agent gives it expertise in that area, not just access to tools.

### Can I create a skill based on my company's internal processes?

Yes. Custom skills let you encode your specific processes, terminology, and decision logic. You write the skill content in natural language, and the agent uses it as authoritative guidance when doing work in that domain.

### How many skills can I assign to one AI employee?

You can assign multiple skills to a single agent. Skills are loaded progressively based on the task at hand, so assigning many skills does not degrade performance. The agent accesses the relevant skill knowledge when it needs it.

### If I update a skill, do all agents that use it get the update automatically?

Yes. Skills are centrally managed. When you update a skill's content, the change applies to all AI employees that have that skill assigned. You do not need to update each agent individually.

### Can I teach my AI agent a skill that is specific to my industry or workflow?

Yes. The skill catalog includes a wide range of pre-built skills and you can create custom skills tailored to your exact process. Once assigned, the agent applies that skill in every relevant interaction.

> I wrote a custom skill for our investor update process. Every quarter the agent follows it exactly. I stopped writing investor updates myself six months ago.
>
> Ben H., CEO · early-stage startup

## Where Skills They Can Master fits

Skills They Can Master is part of Things that control how they behave.

Skip the settings panels. Tell your AI employee what skills to learn, what rules to follow, and what personality to use, all through natural conversation. They can even browse the skill catalog and configure themselves as work evolves.

- [Things that control how they behave](/en/features/behavior): Just ask. It configures itself.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Skills They Can Master](/en/guide/equip/skills)

## More in Behavior

- [Shape Your Employee's Personality](/en/features/behavior/employee_persona): Write a short persona prompt to set how each AI employee talks: formal or casual, brief or detailed, warm or blunt. Every employee starts with a role-based default, and you can rewrite it any time from the Profile tab. The change applies to the employee's next message, no restart needed.
- [Customize Employee Profile](/en/features/behavior/employee_profile_customization): Every hire's Profile tab is fully editable: name, role, team, avatar, persona, language, and tone of voice, all changed in place without a rehire. Updates apply from the next message onward, across every channel the employee uses. A change history on the same tab shows who edited what and when, including edits the employee made to its own persona.
- [Credits Saver](/en/features/behavior/credits_saver): Credits Saver watches every message and quietly hands the easy ones (greetings, quick acknowledgements, 'make that shorter') to a lighter, cheaper model, while real work still runs on the model you picked. On everyday back-and-forth that often means 40 to 50% fewer credits, with no drop in quality where it counts. It is on by default and fully in your control: turn it on or off anytime, and see tracked credits saved, its router cost, and the net benefit on its own page.
- [Ask Your Employee About Sistava](/en/features/behavior/platform_awareness): Ask your employee about Sistava itself and get a real answer: what plan you're on, what a feature costs to unlock, what your limits are, or who else you could hire. Your employee reads the live plan and feature data at the moment you ask, so the answer matches what your account actually has right now, not a guess from training data.
- [Choose How Deeply Your Employee Thinks](/en/features/behavior/reasoning_effort_control): Set how much an employee thinks before it answers, from Off through Minimal, Light, Medium, and Deep, or leave it on Auto so the platform picks the right depth per message on its own. It applies workspace-wide from the AI Behavior settings page, with a per-employee override when one employee's work genuinely needs a different depth than the rest of the team.
- [Set a Per-Task Action Limit](/en/features/behavior/max_actions_override): Set exactly how many actions one employee can take while working on a single task, from 50 up to 1,000. Give a research-heavy employee more room to search, read, and delegate before it has to stop and report back, or cap a simple support employee tighter so it never wanders past what the task needs.
- [Skills Catalog](/en/features/behavior/skills_catalog): Give any AI employee a step-by-step playbook for a specific type of work: how you want blog posts researched, how outreach emails get structured, how a report should be formatted. The employee reads the full skill only when a task actually matches it, so you can attach as many as you want without slowing anything down.
- [Duties Catalog](/en/features/behavior/duties_catalog): Give any employee a set of standing rules they follow on every single interaction, no exceptions: respond within the hour, always CC you on sales emails, never discuss pricing without approval. Pick from the built-in catalog or write your own in plain English, and the employee carries the full text of every active duty in mind on every turn.
- [Personal Preferences Memory](/en/features/behavior/founder_personal_profile): Tell your team leader once how you want to be addressed, when you're working, and how you like answers written, and every employee on your team picks it up automatically. No settings form to fill out: just say it in chat and it sticks.

## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
- [Hire an AI employee](/en/market)
- [Pricing](/en/pricing)