Skills on an agent

Give your agents the skills your workflow needs.

A skill is one outside system an agent can act in, with each of that system’s operations available as an action. Admins decide which skills exist for the organization, and who sees each, in Platform > Agents > Skills registry; you add them to an agent with Add skill. An item an admin set to Auto-injected or On by default is already on every agent in its audience; an Optional one waits for you to add it; an Off one is on no agent.

A skill on an agent: its connection, Mock or Live data, approval switches and its actions by group. Shown with sample data.

Add a skill

Use Add skill in the agent’s settings to give an agent a skill. The panel filters by kind: Connectors for both API and MCP connectors, and Skills for Markdown skill bundles together with the built-in skills the runtime ships with (marked with a Powered by Xpander badge).

For the full catalog of skills you can add within xpander, see the skills catalog.

Skill visibility

Visibility	Who can see and attach it
org	Everyone in the organization. The skill is in the org catalog and any agent can attach it.
restricted	An allowlist of agents. Only the agents on the list can hold the skill.
agent	One owner agent. The skill exists for that agent alone.

Shared with on a skill offers Private, People (named people and groups), One agent and Organization. The restricted and agent scopes are set when a skill is published from a repository with xpander.yaml; Xpander Chat shows such a skill to the agents on its allowlist and refuses to attach it to any other.

As a builder you see the org catalog plus the skills scoped to agents you manage. A skill scoped to agents you do not manage stays out of your catalog. Attaching a skill to an agent that is not on its allowlist is refused, so share it with that agent under Shared with (One agent) first, or ask the skill’s creator or an org admin to do it.

Who may change a scope, how the runtime enforces it, and which audit events it writes are on Skill visibility. To publish skills from a repository with their scope set in xpander.yaml, see Publish Skills.