Released: September 1, 2026
Custom Skills are no longer in beta and are now available for every institution with Bolt Agents. Since the open beta launched in June, schools have used Custom Skills to teach their agents institution-specific scenarios, defining when a skill should fire, what the agent should do, and which actions it can take across Messenger, SMS, email, and voice. With this release, the beta label comes off and Custom Skills becomes a fully supported part of the Bolt Agents platform.
The open beta did exactly what we hoped. More than 50 institutions built over 160 skills that handled thousands of real conversations across phone, web chat, SMS, and email, and their feedback shaped this release. General availability rounds out the toolkit with a Skills Library of starter templates, three new tools, smarter call transfers, and better ways to reuse, monitor, and control the skills you build.
If you built Custom Skills during the beta, nothing changes. Your existing skills keep working exactly as configured, and no action is needed on your end.
Starter templates: Skip the blank page. Clicking + Add Custom Skill now offers Start from a template, a gallery of 12 ready-to-use templates covering common higher-ed scenarios. Selecting one pre-fills an editable draft you tailor to your institution and save as your own independent skill.
New @Hand Off to Person tool: Route a conversation to a human destination, whether a specific person, a team or queue, a role, or a dynamic destination like the contact's assigned staff member. Destinations resolve at runtime with conversation context included, and the handoff falls back gracefully if a destination can't be resolved.
New @Share Entity tool: Share an exact configured resource, such as a document, form, landing page, survey, or external link, delivered appropriately for the channel. Messenger renders a labeled button or link, while voice gives a short verbal handoff instead of reading a URL aloud.
New @Enroll in Rule tool: Enroll the contact in one of your automation Rules directly from a skill. Like @Enroll in Workflow, it runs silently in the background while the agent continues the conversation naturally.
Smarter call transfers: @Transfer Call now supports dynamic destinations in addition to static numbers. Route callers to their assigned staff member's office phone or a Network Role's office phone, with a fallback for when the destination can't be resolved. Existing Transfer Call configurations keep working as static numbers.
Expanded availability controls: Restrict a skill to a specific date window, like a deposit deadline push or orientation season, on top of the existing schedule and channel rules. WhatsApp also joins Messenger, SMS, email, and voice as a channel option.
Duplicate, download, and import: Duplicate a skill to safely experiment with a variation, download it as a portable file, or import a skill file into another instance. Imports arrive pre-filled with tool configurations cleared and start inactive, so nothing goes live by accident.
Authentication for sensitive actions: When an anonymous visitor reaches an action that needs a known contact, like booking an appointment or creating a record-linked task, the agent can prompt them through the existing email-code authentication flow before continuing.
Clearer testing and live monitoring: Response Details in the Agent Test Console now explain in plain language which Custom Skills were evaluated, matched, or skipped, and when a native skill or backend tool ran instead.
The skills you create are a supported, permanent part of how your Bolt Agents work, backed by a growing tool catalog, a template library that accelerates setup, and testing and monitoring that show you exactly what your skills will do before students see them. Custom Skills is included with Bolt Agents, and the tools available in the @ menu follow the Element451 products your institution has enabled.
Use these guides to set up Custom Skills, decide when to use them, and troubleshoot skill behavior
The full guide to creating and managing Custom Skills
Learn when Custom Skills are the right option and when another feature fits better
Write skills that behave predictably
Diagnose why a skill did or did not fire
Tips on how to set up Custom Skills to work with handoffs
Build your first skill in minutes