Claude Agent Skills: A New Standard for Extensible AI

The new Claude Agent Skills seem extremely interesting.

This new capability allows you to build and load specialist skills into Claude for specific tasks. This is a folder of assets that include instructions but also can include scripts and other resources as they make sense to the skill. These can be addressed both from the chat interface and via the API.

I haven't yet had a chance to dig into these, but conceptually this is appealing. From a Copilot perspective, could an approach like this encapsulate some of the capabilities that need to be used for in-app or to-app integrations? Could this be a standard as useful as MCP or A2A, and might it be the go-to approach for building new functionalities focused on a set of technologies common to the AI tool being used?

It's important to note that Copilot Studio already has a feature called "Skills", but this is quite different, effectively allowing you to embed a Bot Framework agent inside your Copilot Studio custom agent. A different purpose, a different level of complexity, and certainly something we'll have to navigate confusion about when/if Microsoft chooses to bring Anthropic's new approach to the Copilot stack.

There are a lot of things on the backlog for future exploration or even videos in the coming weeks, this needs to be added to the list.

First posted on Linkedin on 10/19/2025 -> View Linkedin post here