Teaching it: from a conversation to a skill

You spend an hour on supplier invoices.

You show your assistant where they arrive, tell it that anything from Hanley goes on the trade account and everything else to general costs, that a credit note is filed against the original invoice and never on its own, and that anything over two thousand pounds waits for you. You correct it four times along the way. By the end it is handling them the way you would.

Then the hour ends. What happens to it is what this page is about.

What "remember this" does

Say "remember that anything from Hanley goes on the trade account" and your assistant writes it down.

It picks the right store, saves it, and the entry appears on Manage > Memories (/manage/memories) straight away. From then on it is found by searching, and your agents search what they already know before they begin work, so the next time invoices come up the Hanley rule arrives with them. You never have to mention it again.

Give it a moment to settle. A memory becomes searchable once it has been indexed, which is quick but not instant, so something saved ten seconds ago may not surface in the very next reply.

That is the right home for a fact. It is the wrong home for the hour you just spent.

A memory holds a fact, a skill holds a way of working

A memory is something that is true: a supplier's name, a threshold, a preference, a decision you made and why. It waits until a search brings it back.

A skill is the way you do a kind of work: the order the steps go in, what to check, where the judgement calls sit, what finished looks like, and the mistakes worth avoiding. Your invoice hour is a skill. Saved as twenty separate facts it would come back in fragments, the shape of the process lost.

Player One is built to notice the moment. When you have just taught it something repeatable, it offers, in one line: "Want me to remember how to do this, so I can just do it next time?" You can also say "make this a skill" yourself, at any point, in any conversation.

Making the skill, with you in the room

Saying yes starts a short working session rather than a silent save.

Your assistant asks what the skill should produce and when it should fire, and keeps asking until the answer is sharp, because a vague purpose makes a brittle skill. It offers to research the subject rather than write from your description alone, and you can decline.

Then it asks for the words you or your team would actually use when you want this done: "do the invoices", "process the supplier bills", "run the month-end payables". Those phrases go in as you said them, because they are what lets the skill recognise the request months later.

It drafts the body, reads the whole thing back and asks whether it captures what you meant. One round of corrections here is worth an afternoon of them later. Then it tests itself with you: a list of phrases that should call the skill and a list that should not, walked through until it gets them right.

Why a skill makes the work resumable

Open a new chat next month. There is no thread to scroll back through and nothing of that hour in front of the agent.

Type "do this month's supplier invoices". Before answering it searches what it knows, the skill surfaces, and it gets on with the work. Any agent can do that, not only the one you sat with. The hour stops being something you spent and becomes something your business owns.

This is also why a fresh chat is not a loss. Threads are working space and they end; skills and memories carry across them. Conversations covers why long threads get trimmed and when to start a new one.

Corrections stick

The first time it runs the skill it files a credit note on its own. You say "no, credit notes go against the original invoice".

That correction does not stay in the chat. It attaches to the skill, and every later use carries it, for whichever agent picks the work up. You correct a thing once. To read what a skill has collected, open it on Admin > Skills (/admin/skills): its notes are listed under the text.

Corrections are kept short, because they are read every time the skill is used. Anything that is really reference material, the full VAT treatment of imports rather than a rule of thumb, belongs in memory instead, where it costs nothing until someone asks for it. Your assistant makes that call as it saves; Memory, explained covers the reasoning.

Where a skill lives

You are asked where to put it, and the answer decides who gets it.

• One agent. Craft and working method belonging to that agent alone, on its Skills tab, reached from Manage > Agents (/agents) by opening the agent.
• One project. Process, terminology and business rules for that part of the business and nowhere else. Manage Project > Skills (/project/manage/skills), where you also browse, preview and set how eagerly each one is offered: Always loaded, Hinted or Searchable. A project's own version of a skill wins inside it.
• The whole installation. The way the business does something, wherever it comes up. Admin > Skills (/admin/skills) is the catalogue of everything your agents know how to do: browse by System or Custom, search it, and open any skill to read what it says.

Organising with projects covers working with a project library.

Filling a knowledge base in one sitting

Sometimes you have the knowledge and no working session to hang it on. Say "let's build out the support knowledge base", or "quiz me on what should be in it", and Player One runs a guided session.

It reads what the store is for and what it already covers, tells you where it is thin, then asks one question at a time. You answer, paste something in, or drop a file. It files each piece as it goes and keeps your wording rather than summarising it. Every few captures it tells you what has landed. When you stop it names the gaps worth returning to. What you added is organised in the background afterwards, not while you are still talking.

Build a knowledge base has the steps.

What a few weeks looks like

Nothing dramatic happens on any single day.

What changes is the shape of your asks. In week one you explain the invoice process; by week six you say "invoices" and get them back done properly, credit note rule included. An agent that does one kind of work gets noticeably better at it, because every skill and every correction lands where that work happens: see Agents, delegation and team chat.

The habit worth forming is a small one. When you finish something you would do again, say so. Either the offer comes, or you make it: "make this a skill".

Read next

• Skills, what a skill is and where they live.
• Memory, the stores your agents search.
• It remembers, the shorter version of all this.