Creating Your Own AI Skills

An AI Skill is a multi-step playbook that Vanio AI follows whenever a specific situation comes up. Instead of relying on the AI to improvise, you spell out the exact steps you'd take — and the AI executes them the same way every time.

Skills are how you turn "the way we handle this" into something the AI can do on its own.

When to build a Skill

If you've answered the same kind of guest question more than a few times, or you have a process you walk new staff through, that's a great candidate. Common Skills hosts build:

• Early check-in — check the calendar, check whether the cleaner is done, offer a paid upgrade or approve for free
• Late checkout — check the next reservation, decide how late is okay, confirm with the guest
• Noise complaint — message the guest, log the incident, escalate if it happens twice
• Maintenance request — gather details, photos, create a task, schedule a contractor, follow up with the guest
• Lost and found — confirm the item, arrange shipping, charge the guest

Building a Skill step by step

1. Open AI Skills from the sidebar and click New Skill.
2. Name the scenario. Use plain language: "Guest asks for early check-in". The AI uses this to decide when to run the Skill.
3. Describe when it should fire. Add a short trigger description so the AI knows what kind of guest message or event should kick this off. Example: "Run when a guest asks to arrive before the standard check-in time."
4. Add the steps in order. Each step is one thing the AI should do — check something, ask the guest a question, send a message, create a task, charge a fee. Drag steps to reorder them.
5. Add conditions to steps. A step can be set to only run if a previous step had a certain outcome. For example: "Only offer the paid upgrade if the cleaner says the unit isn't ready yet."
6. Test it in shadow mode. Turn on shadow mode and the AI will work through the Skill in the background without sending real messages. You'll see exactly what it would have said and done.
7. Review the shadow runs. Read through a handful of real situations where the Skill fired. Approve the ones that look right, reject the ones that don't. The AI learns from your feedback.
8. Activate. Once you're confident, switch the Skill from shadow mode to live. From that point on, Vanio AI will handle these situations for you.

Templates to start from

You don't have to build every Skill from scratch. The Templates library includes ready-made Skills for the scenarios above. Pick one, adjust the wording and rules for your business, and you're 90% done.

Auto-detection: let the AI suggest Skills

Vanio AI watches for patterns in the way you and your team handle situations. When it notices you doing the same thing repeatedly — for example, manually approving early check-ins for guests who book longer stays — it will suggest turning that pattern into a Skill. You'll see the suggestion in your inbox; one click turns it into a draft Skill you can edit and activate.

This is the easiest way to grow your library: the AI tells you what to automate based on what you're already doing.

Common questions

Will the AI go off-script? No. Once a Skill is active, the AI follows the steps in order. It only deviates if a step explicitly allows it to.

Can I see what a Skill did? Yes. Every Skill run is logged step by step in the conversation timeline so you can see exactly what happened.

Can a Skill ask me before doing something risky? Yes. Add an approval step and the AI will pause and ping you for a thumbs up before continuing.

What if two Skills could handle the same situation? The AI picks the most specific match. You can also set priority on each Skill if you want a clear winner.