What is a skill?

A skill is a single, focused set of instructions that teaches your AI client how to do one job with your Zywave data: assemble a compliance packet, audit your book, size a territory, run a prospecting campaign, using the tools already exposed by the Zywave MCP Server. Each one is a single SKILL.md file, written in the open Agent Skills format, so there’s no per-platform conversion: Claude, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork, and more all read the same file directly.

A skill is not the Zywave MCP connection itself. You connect the MCP once (see Getting started), and every skill you add after that reuses the same connection. Adding a skill is the second step, not a separate login.

For how skills work as a general concept in Claude, outside anything Zywave-specific, see Anthropic’s own Use skills in Claude.

What can a skill do?

Every skill in the Skills Library is one of a handful of repeatable shapes:

  • Discover new prospects: search Zywave market data for companies or households you don’t work with yet.
  • Research before you engage: assemble a deep, sourced brief on one company or household before you reach out.
  • Manage your book of business: look up, create, and update accounts and contacts in your CRM.
  • Pull resources to share: assemble notices, certificates, and other documents from the content library, filled in and ready to send.
  • Get answers from the library: answer an insurance question grounded in Zywave’s content, not general knowledge.
  • Launch a prospecting campaign: build a reviewed, multi-touch email sequence to a list of prospects.

Read-only skills (search, audit, research) never change anything in Zywave. A skill that can write (create an account, enrich a contact, send an email) always stops for your explicit confirmation before it does, and says so on its own page under What it needs from you.

Not sure which of these applies to you? Browse the Library by role: P&C producer, account manager, EB consultant, HR & compliance, or agency operations. Or open any skill’s own page for its example prompt and exactly what it needs from you.

Installing the Zywave Skills Marketplace

Every skill above is published to the public Zywave/skills repository, a real, installable marketplace, not just this site’s read-only pages. Install one skill, a handful, or all of them, into whichever AI client you already use. Steps differ by client; the underlying skill file is identical everywhere.

Claude

Desktop app, claude.ai, and Claude Code all add a plugin marketplace the same way. Enter Zywave/skills (or https://github.com/Zywave/skills) as the source, then install the zywave-skills plugin. It bundles every skill in the repo and updates automatically as skills there change. See Anthropic's own guides for the exact screens, which move between releases: Use plugins in Claude (Desktop app and claude.ai), Discover and install plugins through marketplaces (Claude Code), and, for a team-wide rollout, Manage plugins for your organization.

From a Claude Code terminal specifically:

/plugin marketplace add Zywave/skills
/plugin install zywave-skills@zywave-skills

ChatGPT

A workspace admin imports this repo once, using https://github.com/Zywave/skills as the source. After that it's available to everyone in the workspace and syncs automatically. Full steps in OpenAI's own guide: Importing and syncing plugin marketplaces from GitHub.

Office 365 (Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork)

Cowork skills are just a folder in your OneDrive, no admin step: download the skill's folder from Zywave/skills into Documents/Cowork/skills/<skill-name>/. Cowork picks it up at the start of your next conversation (50-skill limit per profile). Microsoft's own guide covers the rest, including the two other ways to create a skill: Customize Copilot Cowork.

Manual (terminal, or any other client)

One command installs every skill in the repo into any of 49+ supported clients: GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, and more.

gh skill install Zywave/skills --all

Requires GitHub CLI (gh) v2.90.0 or later. Drop --all to pick specific skills interactively instead. Full reference in GitHub's own manual: gh skill install. For a client with no importer at all, download the skill's SKILL.md directly from Zywave/skills and add it however that client accepts a custom skill file. Every skill here follows the open Agent Skills format, so any compliant client reads it directly.

Every install method above points at the same Zywave/skills repo. Nothing here is a different skill format per client. See the repo's own install guide for a client not covered above (Gemini Enterprise, for one). Every skill in the marketplace assumes the Zywave MCP server is already connected. Without it, the tools a skill calls out by name are not available.