Free Lesson

Claude Skills, Explained: What They Are and How They Work

Hosted by Sash Mohapatra

Thu, Aug 27, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Orchestration Certification for Business Leaders: Build your personal AI OS
Sash Mohapatra
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What you'll learn

What a Claude skill is and what it's for

A capability you load on demand: a plain-English file that makes Claude run a task the same way every time.

How a skill is built inside

The three parts of every skill: its name, the trigger that tells Claude when to use it, and its instructions.

Where skills run: chat, Cowork, and Code

The same skill working across Claude chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, so you know where each one fits.

How skills and agents work together

When a skill calls in an agent, and when an agent reaches for a skill, shown live.

A tour of the Anthropic skills and plugin marketplace

Finding and customizing skills and plugins from the Anthropic marketplace

Why this topic matters

A skill packages a task so Claude does it the same way every time. You set it up once and run it on command, instead of explaining what you want on every try. And because each skill does one job, you can combine them: one skill feeds another, or several run together. That is how a single task becomes an orchestrated workflow. It starts with knowing what one skill is.

You'll learn from

Sash Mohapatra

20 years at Microsoft, engineer to Director of Data & AI Sales, Capital Markets

Sash Mohapatra spent 20 years at Microsoft, moving from customer engineering to Director of AI Sales. He led cloud and ML adoption for Fortune 500 clients. After being laid off in 2023, he used AI to navigate his own career transition and built a system for doing it well.

Now he runs riftlab.ai, where consults for companies on AI adoption - training teams, building agents and helping leaders navigate the AI revolution.

He believes that human ingenuity in the AI revolution can be preserved and scaled through participation. Lean in, learn how to orchestrate AI, be the human in the loop and amplify your leverage and capabilities with AI.

Trained employees from

MSCI
Salesforce
Amplitude
JLL
Broadcom Inc.
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