Google loves building several tools for one job and giving them names that blur together.
Don’t believe me? This is the company that gave us Talk, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Meet, and Chat. On November 17, that habit becomes your problem.
Google will begin force-migrating Gems on personal Google accounts into a new format called Skills, and work and school accounts follow in 2027.
Meanwhile, Google is moving Spark , its background agent, into the main chat as “Task,” right alongside Scheduled Actions, a timer feature that’s been around since 2025. Good luck guessing which does what from the names alone.
Here’s what each one does and what to do with your saved workflows before the old interface goes away.
Gems are turning into Skills, and they’re moving into your chat
No more separate windows for every bot
Starting November 17, Google will begin automatically converting personal Gems into Skills.
You can keep using your Gems until they are converted. After that, Gems are gone for good on personal accounts.
Gems were standalone custom bots. You picked one from a sidebar and talked to it in its own walled-off window. Skills pull your custom instructions into the main chat.
You type a forward slash in the prompt bar and pick the Skill you want. Gemini can also apply a Skill on its own when it decides one fits your prompt.
Stacking is the bigger upgrade, because you can apply multiple Skills in one conversation. One Skill might enforce your company branding while another sets the writing tone.
You don’t have to shuttle outputs back and forth between bots to get the results you want.
Unfortunately, most built-in tools you can switch on in a Gem, like Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning, and video and music generation, don’t work with Skills yet.
You also can’t share a Skill or attach files from Drive yet, though Google says both are coming soon. If one of your Gems leans on any of those, test it before November 17.
Scheduled Actions are prompts with an alarm clock
Fine for briefings but unreliable for anything more complex
With Scheduled Actions, you write a prompt, tell Gemini when and how often to run it, and it prepares the result in the background. You can have up to 10 running at a time.
On the web, the chat marks itself as unread. On mobile, you get a push notification, which may appear on your lock screen depending on your settings.
You no longer need a Google AI subscription for this, although Google is still rolling it out to free accounts, and it only works with Keep Activity on.
Gemini prepares each result in the hour before delivery, and that head start is its main weakness. So stick to stuff that doesn’t change by the minute.
Google’s examples include a morning digest of your calendar, to-do list, and emails, plus a daily forecast paired with outfit ideas.
There’s one more quirk. If an action depends on where you are, like a daily weather report, Gemini uses the location you were in when you set it up.
It won’t follow you around, so if you travel, you’ll get forecasts for home until you edit the action to name a new city. (Hope you don’t travel much.)
If you need something that reacts to events instead of a clock, that’s Spark’s job.
Spark is the agent that keeps working after you log off
It does the legwork, then waits for your OK
In a move that proves my point, Google seems to be retiring the name.
In a redesign that’s rolling out now, Spark shows up as “Task” in a new Chat and Task switch next to the prompt box, and its settings page is now called Task settings.
Google’s help pages still call it Spark. Whatever you call it, it’s Google’s always-on background agent. It runs on Google Cloud virtual machines, so it keeps going after you close your laptop or lock your phone.
You give it a high-level goal, like researching competitors across the web, and it works through the steps on its own. Google also built in a few checkpoints.
Spark is designed to ask for your OK before it sends a message, changes your data, makes a purchase, or submits a web form, and to hand control back to you when a site wants a password or payment details.
Google is careful to say these safeguards aren’t foolproof, so keep an eye on anything important.
You can have up to 15 tasks running at once. You’ll need a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription with Keep Activity switched on.
Why scheduling a Spark task isn’t a Scheduled Action
Both features run on a schedule, but they aren’t twins
Now the confusing part is that you can schedule a Scheduled Action. You can also schedule a Spark task. They sound the same, but they aren’t.
Unlike a regular chat or a Scheduled Action, Spark can kick off when something happens instead of at a set time, and it can run multistep jobs in your apps and on the web while you’re away.
Have it watch flight prices and ping you when a fare drops into your budget. Or let it comb through your inbox and unsubscribe you from every newsletter you’ve been ignoring.
Back up your prompts while you can
If you want Gemini to follow the same instructions every time, Skills have you covered, and they’re free.
If you want a briefing waiting for you every morning, a Scheduled Action does the job without a subscription.
Spark, or Task, or whatever Google calls it by the time you read this, is only worth paying for if you want Gemini to react to events and work across your apps while you’re away.
Also, don’t forget to back up your Gems before November 17. Copy each one’s instructions into a Markdown file, and download any knowledge files.
Google will almost certainly rename, merge, or retire at least one of these again. When it does, your prompts will still be sitting safely with you.
