Skills overview

Skills are the foundational context, rules, and behavioral guidelines that shape how Opal creates output and tailors it to your unique needs. A simple instruction can include your company's brand guidelines, ensuring Opal generates on-brand content. Other common skills include details about your company's products and services, target personas, user journey funnel, term-bases, and so on.

Opal dynamically selects and applies skills based on their activation trigger criteria. This ensures Opal applies the most relevant guidelines and adapts its responses to the current context and your requirements.

Skills help your team produce on-brand content without manually specifying preferences in every prompt.

Skills

Skills tell Opal how to behave, shaping its tone, output format, and overall approach. Skills are available in the following two types:

• Instance skills – Administrators set to enforce organization-wide standards.
• Personal skills – Individual users set to match their own preferences and working style. 

Organization skills

Opal administrators can create, update, and delete organization skills. These skills enforce organization-wide policies, guidelines, brand standards, or platform behaviors. Examples include brand voice guidelines, approved content templates, compliance rules, or default behaviors for all teams. See Create an organization-wide skill for information.

Examples of organization-wide skills include the following:

• Brand voice – Always write in Optimizely's tone of voice: professional, direct, and action-oriented.
• Writing style rules – Specific grammar, vocabulary, and formatting standards (like a company style guide).
• Canvas behavior – Always use a canvas when creating persistent artifacts like briefs, reports, or blog posts.
• Approved tools – Use Chart.js for all data visualizations or Use Tailwind CSS for all HTML output.
• Content templates – When creating a campaign brief, follow the standard template.
• Compliance rules – Never include pricing information in generated content without a disclaimer.
• Presentation standards – All presentations must use reveal.js with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Image and media guidelines – Always use Optimizely's file server URLs when embedding images.

For information on administrator functions, see Get started with Optimizely Opal for administrators. 

Personal skills

Opal users can create, update, and delete personal skills. Personal skills apply to you (the individual user). Capture your explicit preferences, working style, or custom behaviors you want Opal to follow in your interactions. Examples of personal skills include the following:

• Response format – Always respond in bullet points or Keep responses under 200 words.
• Tone preferences – Use a casual, conversational tone with me or Be more concise and skip the pleasantries.
• Role context – I am a developer, so always include code snippets when relevant.
• Language – Always respond in French.
• Output defaults – When creating documents, always use a canvas or Default to tables over bullet lists.
• Shortcuts – When I say 'quick summary,' give me a three-bullet TL;DR.
• Expertise level – Assume I have advanced knowledge of A/B testing, skip the basics.
• Reminders – Always remind me to add a meta description when writing blog posts.

For information on user functions, see Get started with Optimizely Opal for users.

Prebuilt skills

Optimizely provides prebuilt skills already loaded in your Opal instance. Use them immediately or update them to meet your organization's requirements. These skills serve as a foundation to accelerate your implementation. 

By default, prebuilt skills are off. Turn them on by toggling Active on. Follow the activation steps in each linked article to turn on the skill.

• Campaign Brief – Guides the creation of a comprehensive marketing campaign brief, detailing its purpose, objectives, target audience, key messages, deliverables, channels, and measurement strategies.
• Industry Marketer – Adapts existing content from a given URL to a specified industry, customizing it with relevant terminology and examples.
• Keyword-Research – Generates an expert-level keyword research report using the Idealab Opal tools, providing insights into search volume, Cost Per Click (CPC), related keywords, and common questions to inform your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
• Marketing Planning Meeting – Helps organize and facilitate marketing planning meetings by generating agendas, summarizing key discussion points, and outlining action items.
• Marketing Researcher – Conducts in-depth research on a topic you specify, providing comprehensive reports and marketing strategy suggestions.
• Personalization Advisor – Helps you uncover, design, and measure high-value personalization opportunities.
• Task Brief – Generates a structured and actionable brief for a specific task or deliverable, ensuring it aligns with your overall campaign goals, audience, and requirements.
• Tone of Voice (Sample) – Provides a comprehensive guide to maintaining a consistent brand voice across all content, focusing on professionalism, positivity, insightfulness, and approachability.
• Video Transcription – Transcribes audio from a video, offering plain text or .srt formats and removing filler words.

Skill samples

Unlike prebuilt skills, skill samples are not loaded into your Opal instance automatically. Copy and customize them to create your own skills from scratch. See the following samples:

• Sample boilerplate press release skill
• Sample competitor skill
• Sample persona skill
• Sample products and services skill
• Sample tracked keyword skill

Components of an skill

Each skill contains the following components:

1. Name – A short, descriptive identifier for the skill for easy recognition.
2. Active – Whether the skill is enabled in Opal.
3. Shortcut – A keyword you can use to call this skill from Opal Chat by entering /. If you leave this field empty, this skill does not display in the / menu. See the Shortcut section.
4. Core skill – The skill's behavior, including objectives, response formats, and constraints. See the Core skill section.
5. Activation Trigger – Specifies whether this skill triggers by keyword and intent matching or when specific tools are used. See the Activation trigger section.
6. Where to use – Specifies an Optimizely product and instance where this skill applies. If you do not select a product, the skill applies to all products. The instance is a specific connected deployment of an Optimizely product (such as Content Marketing Platform (CMP), Content Management System (CMS), Feature Experimentation, and so on) linked to your Opal instance.

Shortcut

A shortcut is a / keyword you assign to an skill to invoke it on demand from Opal Chat. Rather than relying on Opal to automatically detect when an skill applies, a shortcut gives you control.

Shortcuts work well for skill-based skills you want available at any time but do not want Opal to apply automatically, for example, generating content in a specific format, running a defined research workflow, or applying a particular tone.

To run an skill manually, enter / followed by the shortcut name in the Opal Chat input field. Opal activates the skill and applies it to your request.

Core skill

Write the Core skill as you would write guidance for a new team member. Use the smart text editor with clear structure and complete details so Opal can execute tasks effectively. Detailed skills reduce ambiguity and keep outputs consistent. To create a well-structured Core skill section, include the following:

• Objective or goal – Clearly state what the skill achieves.
• Execution steps or process – Outline the step-by-step skills Opal follows, including prompts or questions for the user.
• Response format guidelines – Define how Opal formats its responses (for instance, tables or lists).
• Constraints or safety measures – List limitations or considerations Opal should observe.

Activation trigger

Use the Activation trigger to specify the exact conditions that activate your skills. Select Keyword / Intent or Tool.

Keyword / Intent

If you select Keyword / Intent the skill activates based on your intent, keywords, or phrases. 

Apply the following techniques to write Keyword / Intent conditions that activate accurately and consistently:

• Anchor your condition to a specific action or workflow – Vague intent-based descriptions give Opal too much room for interpretation and lead to false matches. Reference a specific workflow, tool, or product feature instead.
  • Before – When asked to help with marketing.
  • After – When asked to configure a marketing promotion campaign in the promotions manager.
  • Why it matters – Without a specific anchor, the skill activates for unrelated prompts. Naming the tool or workflow sets a clear boundary.
• State keywords explicitly – If your skill should only activate for a specific concept, name the keyword directly. This turns semantic matching into keyword matching, which is more precise for narrow use cases.
  • Before – When asked to help with creating, planning, or designing a marketing promotion.
  • After – ONLY use for the keyword "marketing promotion." Do NOT use for other keywords like sale, offer, or discount.
  • Why it matters – Semantic matching can link related concepts unexpectedly. A prompt such as Email subject for strawberries on sale can trigger a "marketing promotion" skill because the relevancy model connects "sale" to "promotion." Explicit keywords prevent this.
• Add negative conditions to block false matches – Use Do NOT use for... to block related-but-wrong prompts. The relevancy model respects explicit exclusions.
  • Before – When asked about customer data.
  • After – When asked to export, segment, or analyze customer data in the Customer Data Platform (CDP). Do NOT use for questions about individual customer support tickets or account settings.
  • Why it matters – Without exclusions, skills activate for prompts that are topically related but contextually wrong. Exclusions give Opal a clear signal to stand down.
• List synonyms for narrow concepts – If users might phrase the same request in different ways, include alternative terms. This prevents the skill from failing to activate because the user chose a different word.
  • Example – When asked about content scoring, content grades, or content quality scores.
  • Why it matters – An skill scoped too narrowly — or written in jargon — fails to activate when it should. Listing synonyms and natural-language variants keeps coverage complete without broadening the scope.
• Draw clear boundaries between similar skills – If you have multiple skills covering related topics, make sure their Keyword / Intent conditions are distinct. Overlapping conditions cause both skills to trigger at the same time and produce inconsistent or conflicting responses.
  • Before – Two skills both use When the user asks about marketing, causing both to activate for the same prompts.
  • After – Separate the conditions so each skill has a distinct scope:
    • skill A – Content creation – When the user asks to write, draft, or brainstorm marketing content such as email copy, social media posts, or ad text.
    • skill B – Campaign configuration – When the user asks to create, schedule, or configure a marketing campaign or automation workflow. Do NOT use for writing content or copy.
  • Why it matters – Overlapping Keyword / Intent conditions mean both skills trigger on the same prompt. Explicit boundaries and mutual exclusions keep each skill focused.

The following table outlines common scoping goals, the corresponding technique to apply in the Keyword / Intent, and a practical example of each.

Tool

If you select Tool, the skill activates when the selected tools are called.

How Opal selects which skills to use

When you send a message, Opal decides which skills are relevant before it generates a response. The following explain the steps Opal takes:

1. Opal gathers all active skills – Opal collects all skills available to you and filters out any that are deactivated.
2. Opal matches tool-based skills first – When an skill's Activation Trigger is Tool, Opal applies it automatically whenever those tools are available. Opal requires no further evaluation.

3. Opal evaluates remaining skills for relevance – An AI model evaluates all remaining skills by reading the following:

   • Your latest message.
   • The conversation history.
   • The Keyword / Intent field of each skill.

   The model then decides which skills are relevant to your conversation. See the following How the relevancy model works section for information.

4. Opal adds matched skills to context – Opal adds selected skills to the system prompt so it can follow them when generating a response.

Opal uses the Activation Trigger to decide whether an skill is relevant. Opal does not consider an skill's name or core content during selection. It applies them only after selecting an skill.

How the relevancy model works

The AI model that evaluates skill relevancy prioritizes inclusion over exclusion. The model includes a potentially relevant skill rather than risk missing one that matters. This means the following:

• Broad or generic Keyword / Intent descriptions match frequently. If your purpose is vague, the model includes the skill rather than excludes it.
• The model makes semantic connections. The model understands that "email subject for a sale" is conceptually related to "marketing promotion," even if those exact words do not appear in your prompt.
• Opal does not score or rank skills, it either includes or excludes each one. Opal does not apply partial matches. 

This inclusive behavior is intentional. Missing a relevant skill is worse than including an extra
one. Write your Keyword / Intent carefully to avoid unwanted activations. See Keyword / Intent for best practices and examples.