How Agent Skills Can Make AI Actually Useful for Your Business

Most people use AI the same way: open a chat, type a prompt, hope for the best. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't, because the AI has no idea how your business operates, what tools you use, or what good output looks like for your team.

Agent skills change that. They're a simple, open format for giving AI agents the specific knowledge they need to do a job well. And they're about to reshape how marketing teams, designers, and agencies work with AI.

What Are Agent Skills?

An agent skill is a folder containing instructions, reference docs, and scripts that an AI agent can read when it needs them. Think of it like an onboarding guide you'd hand a new team member on their first day, except the new hire is an AI model.

Each skill has a SKILL.md file that tells the agent what the skill does and when to use it. When the agent encounters a task that matches, it reads the instructions and gets to work with the right context. No guessing, no hallucinating, no generic output.

Anthropic originally built skills for Claude, then released the format as an open standard. Now they work across a growing number of AI tools, and partners like Canva, Notion, Figma, and Atlassian are already building their own.

Here's why that matters for you.

Why Should Marketers and Designers Care?

If you've ever asked an AI to write a blog post and received something that sounds like a Wikipedia entry, you've hit the knowledge gap problem. The AI is smart, but it doesn't know your brand voice, your audience, your content strategy, or your style guidelines.

Skills close that gap. A well-built skill can teach an AI how your team actually works: how you structure blog posts, what tone you use, which metrics matter, and how you format deliverables. The result is output that's useful from the first draft, not the fifth.

And skills aren't limited to coding tools. You can use them in Claude's web interface, in Claude Cowork (a desktop tool for file and task automation), and through the API. If your workflow involves generating reports, drafting content, analysing data, or building presentations, skills can improve the quality of every one of those tasks.

How We Use Agent Skills Every Day

At 224 Industries, we started building custom skills because we were tired of babysitting AI output. We're a Webflow agency that works with tech and SaaS companies like Easy Agile, Clear Dynamics, and Giraffe, and our work spans strategy, design, and development. AI touches all three.

Here's how skills show up in our day-to-day:

Research and reporting. We use skills that guide Claude through multi-step research workflows, pulling data from the web, structuring findings, and producing reports that are 30+ pages long. What used to take a full day of manual work now takes under an hour, and the output follows our formatting standards every time.

Content creation. Our SEO content skill teaches the AI how to write for both search engines and AI answer engines, following our internal guidelines for keyword placement, structure, and tone. It even checks for common AI-sounding phrases and flags them before we publish.

Code and development. Our open-source Webflow agent skills give coding agents accurate documentation for Webflow's APIs. Before we built these, agents would hallucinate methods that don't exist. Now they produce working code on the first pass.

Data analysis. We have a CSV analysis skill that turns raw data exports into clear statistical summaries with visualisations, using our preferred tools and formatting conventions.

The pattern is the same every time: teach the AI once, use it repeatedly, get better results.

Our Webflow Agent Skills (Open Source)

We released five Webflow agent skills as open source because we saw a gap nobody was filling. AI coding agents are powerful, but they had zero context on how Webflow's APIs actually work. The result was hallucinated code and wasted time.

Our skills cover the Designer API (building extensions and using the API Playground), the Browser API (consent management and tracking), Code Components (React components via DevLink), Webhooks (signature verification and event handling), and the Enterprise API (workspace management and audit logs).

Each skill follows the open Agent Skills standard and works with Claude everywhere (e.g. web, Cowork, and Code), Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and any other compatible agent. They're MIT-licensed and free.

The response from the Webflow community has been positive. After building them for our internal workflow, we realised other agencies and developers would face the same problems. Open-sourcing them was the obvious next step.

Agent Skills as a Lead Magnet

Here's something most businesses haven't figured out yet: agent skills make excellent lead magnets.

If your company has expertise in a specific domain, you can package that knowledge into a skill and offer it as a free download. The people who want it are exactly your target audience: they use AI tools, they work in your industry, and they're actively looking for ways to get better results.

Take our Webflow skills. Every developer or agency that installs them is someone who builds on Webflow. That's our core audience, discovering our brand through a tool that genuinely helps them.

Compare that to a generic PDF ebook that sits in someone's downloads folder unopened. A skill is something people actually use, repeatedly, inside the tools they already work with. The brand exposure compounds every time someone runs it.

Selling and Distributing Skills Privately

Free skills work for lead generation. But there's also a real opportunity to sell premium skills.

If you've spent months refining a workflow (your content strategy, your QA process, your reporting framework), that expertise has value. Packaging it as a skill and distributing it privately, whether through direct sales, a membership, or as part of a service offering, gives clients something tangible beyond a PDF process document.

A few ways this could work: an SEO agency sells a content brief skill that generates briefs matching their methodology. A design studio offers a brand guidelines skill that teaches AI to apply their client's visual identity correctly. A consultancy bundles custom skills as part of their retainer.

The format is simple enough that anyone can build a skill, but the knowledge inside it is what makes it valuable. That's a hard combination to copy.

How We Can Help You Build Your Own

This is where we come in. At 224 Industries, we don't just build skills for our own use. We help brands create agent skills that match their workflows, capture their expertise, and improve how their teams work with AI.

That could look like building a set of custom skills for your marketing team so your AI-generated content always hits the mark. It could mean creating a skill-based lead magnet that attracts your ideal audience. Or it could be packaging your agency's methodology into skills you distribute to clients.

We handle the strategy, the skill architecture, and the testing to make sure the output actually meets your standards. We've been through the trial and error already (our early skills were too long, too vague, and too generic before we dialled in what works).

Where This Is Heading

Agent skills are still early. Anthropic launched them in October 2025 and opened the standard in December. But the trajectory is clear: AI agents are moving from general-purpose assistants to specialised tools that know how to do specific jobs well.

The businesses that invest in skills now (building them, using them, distributing them) will have a serious head start. Not because the technology is complicated, but because the hard part is the knowledge and the workflows that go inside them.

If you're curious about what agent skills could look like for your team, book a call with us. We'll walk you through the possibilities and figure out where skills would have the biggest impact on your work.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are agent skills?

Agent skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and reference docs that AI agents load when they need specific knowledge to complete a task. They follow an open standard and work across tools like Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and others.

Do I need to be technical to use agent skills?

No. You can use pre-built skills in Claude's web and desktop apps without writing a single line of code. Creating custom skills does involve some setup, but the format is designed to be readable and editable by anyone.

What AI tools support agent skills?

The open Agent Skills standard is supported by Claude (web, desktop, API, and Claude Code), Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Factory Droid, and a growing number of other AI tools.

Can I use agent skills as a lead magnet?

Yes. Skills make strong lead magnets because they're useful tools people actually return to, not static content that gets downloaded once and forgotten. If your target audience uses AI tools, a free skill that helps them do their job better is an effective way to reach them.

How can 224 Industries help with agent skills?

We build custom agent skills for brands, create skill-based lead magnets, and help teams integrate skills into their workflows. We also maintain open-source Webflow agent skills used by developers and agencies worldwide.