AI Skills and Custom GPTs for Research
AI Agent Skills and Custom GPTs are reusable ways to give AI assistants task-specific instructions, background knowledge, and workflow guidance. In this hands-on workshop, researchers will learn how to use them to support repeated scholarly work more consistently, instead of rebuilding the same prompt and context every time.
Participants will explore how recurring tasks such as literature triage, draft feedback, research planning, communication, and project-specific guidance can become reusable assistants with clearer behavior and more predictable outputs. The workshop emphasizes practical design choices: what context to preserve, what behavior to standardize, when to use a Custom GPT versus an Agent Skill, and how to evaluate whether the assistant is helping the researcher think more clearly rather than adding noise or false confidence.
Live Workshop
Session #1 for Summer 2026
Course Outline
- Reusable AI assistant patterns for research workflows
- Designing clear instructions, context, and boundaries
- Comparing Custom GPTs and Agent Skills
- Turning repeated scholarly tasks into reusable assistants
- Evaluating assistant behavior, output quality, and failure modes
Prerequisites
Participants must have active Clemson ChatGPT Edu accounts in order to participate. You should be comfortable using a conversational AI assistant for basic research or writing tasks. No programming experience is required.