What's the difference between a skill and tool?
When you configure a Rovo agent in Studio, you're shaping what it can do by giving it both tools and skills. These are the two types of capabilities that determine how your agent works.
Here’s a simple overview:
| Tools | Skills |
|---|---|---|
Role | What the agent can do | How the agent does it |
Outcome | A single action with defined inputs and outputs. | A reusable set of instructions that combine tools with reasoning. |
Read on to understand what tools and skills are, how they differ, and how they work together.
What are tools?
Tools are the individual actions an agent can take. Each tool does one specific thing: transition a Jira work item, send a Slack message, or edit a Confluence page. Tools have defined inputs and outputs. They're precise, reliable, and narrow in their role.
An agent's power comes partly from which tools it has available. More tools means more actions the agent can take on your behalf. When you create an agent in Studio, you're deciding what it's allowed to do in the world.
Think of tools as the utensils a chef has access to. A well-stocked kitchen means more options to cook with.
What are skills?
Skills are reusable instructions that tell an agent how to approach a specific type of task. While tools instruct an agent to act, skills tell it how to act well, applying best practices so work gets done consistently and reliably without starting from scratch each time.
A skill might call a single tool, or it might orchestrate several tools with reasoning in between, so it can decide what to do next based on what it finds along the way.
Skills make agent work more transparent. You can see which skill is running and what steps it's following, which makes the agent easier to trust and troubleshoot.
Think of skills as the recipes a chef draws upon. An agent is capable enough to improvise, but a skill ensures a particular task comes out right every time.
Some skills require specific tools to run effectively. If you add a skill but not the required tool, we'll automatically add the tool when the agent is triggered in Studio.
Select Read on a skill card to view which tools a skill requires.
How tools and skills work together
An agent without tools can process, but can't act. An agent without skills can act, but may not take your preferred approach.
Together, tools and skills make an agent both capable and reliable.
Here’s a quick example. Say you ask a Rovo agent to prepare a status update for your team.
The agent receives your request and determines it needs to gather recent activity and synthesize it into a summary.
The skill provides the structured approach: where to look, what to include, how to format the output.
The tools do the actual work: pulling recent Jira activity, reading Confluence updates, checking relevant messages.
The agent orchestrates, the skill guides, and the tools execute.
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