Skills
Using and managing AI skills, including grounded-reply skills.
Skills are purpose-specific prompt packages the AI can load mid-conversation to produce higher-quality, opinionated output. When a skill is loaded, its guidance is layered into the system prompt for the rest of the turn and takes precedence over the generic response rules. Skills stack — the AI can load more than one and their guidance composes.
The AI loads a skill automatically when your request matches one; you'll see a chip such as Skill: Client Proposal in the conversation. You don't need to invoke skills by name.
Document skills
These produce a single, polished document rendered in the Hub as an artifact:
| Skill | Produces |
|---|---|
| Executive Report | A structured executive report with typography and KPI framing |
| Project Status | A status document with KPI cards and a work grid |
| Client Proposal | A client-ready proposal: cover, approach, deliverables, timeline, pricing, acceptance |
| One-Pager | A single-page briefing, memo, or decision document |
| Report | A generic, cleanly-formatted document |
Grounded-reply skills
These skills answer a request by retrieving context first, then responding — they do not answer from the model's general knowledge alone. When one is active, the AI reasons about what information the answer depends on, searches the relevant connected tools and internal artifacts, and grounds its reply in what comes back.
| Skill | What it does | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| Email Reply | Reads an incoming email, retrieves the context it needs (prior conversations, product docs, project status), and composes a draft reply in your Drafts folder | Microsoft 365 connected |
| Sales Reply | Answers a prospect/customer question (advantages, comparisons, objections) grounded in product, marketing, and proposal material | — |
| Knowledge-Grounded Q&A | Answers a factual question about your organization strictly from retrieved sources, and names those sources | — |
The Email Reply skill creates a draft only — it never sends mail on your behalf. Review and send the draft yourself from Outlook.
Grounded-reply skills are only as good as what's connected. If the relevant integration isn't connected — or a connector's search returns little — the AI will tell you what it couldn't verify rather than fabricate specifics. Cosmo does not yet index internal artifacts or memory for semantic search, so internal lookups rely on each connector's own search and exact/keyword matches.
Retrieval-first behavior
Whenever you have connectors or internal artifacts available, the AI follows a retrieval-first contract for any request that depends on facts about your tools, people, or documents:
- Name what it needs — the facts the answer depends on.
- Decide the sources — which connected tools would hold them.
- Fan out and retrieve — search and read across those tools.
- Ground the answer — synthesize only from what was retrieved.
- Flag thin grounding — say what's missing instead of inventing detail.
This applies to all chat, not just the grounded-reply skills; the skills add task-specific structure on top of it.
Availability
Skills that depend on a tool are hidden until that tool is connected — for example, Email Reply only appears once Microsoft 365 is connected. See Integrations to connect your tools.