Agent skills, and what Karo does with them
See how Karo's Agent Skills handle complex venue tasks like refunds and access card bookings end to end – the same way, every time.
You may have heard the word “skill” used to describe what an AI agent can do, and assumed it was marketing language. It is not. Over the last year, “skills” have become a specific architectural choice in how modern AI agents are built. The distinction matters because it changes what an agent can actually be relied on to handle, how consistently it does it, and whether your team can trust the outcome. If you have wondered why Karo can complete some tasks end to end while other AI tools stall halfway, this is for you.
What an agent skill is
A skill is a packaged set of instructions, examples, and rules that gives an agent a reliable way to do a specific job. Think of it as the difference between asking a colleague who has done a task once before and asking one who has done it five hundred times and written down their method.
Anthropic introduced Agent Skills as part of how Claude is built and run, and the underlying idea has been adopted across the field. A skill is not the same as a function or a tool call. Functions execute discrete actions: “look up an event”, “search a database”, “fetch an order”. Skills sit above those: they describe how to handle an entire process, what counts as a good outcome, when to escalate, and what to say at each step.
The practical effect is consistency. An agent without skills can answer the same question differently every time. An agent running a skill follows a defined approach that has been tested, refined, and packaged so it works the same way at 3am as it does at 3pm.
How this is different from what Karo already did
Karo has always had functions. Patrons can search for events, retrieve their orders, hand off to a human, and see real-time availability against your ticketing system. Each of those is a discrete tool Karo can call when it makes sense to do so.
What is newer is the layer above that: skills that take a complex, multi-step task and run it as a single, structured process. A skill knows when to call which functions, in what order, what to do if a step fails, and how to communicate progress to the patron. The agent runs the skill the same way every time, on every conversation that needs it.
The two skills Karo runs today
Karo currently has two skills in production, and both reflect work that previously had to be done by box office staff.
The first is a refund-handling skill, supported by the Line-Up ticketing platform. When a patron asks for a refund, the skill walks the conversation through reason capture, scores the request against the venue’s own policy, applies the timing rules the venue has set, and either initiates the refund or routes the case to a member of staff with a recommended next action. The venue retains control over policy and threshold. The skill applies them consistently.
The second is an access card guidance skill, currently running at Blackpool Grand Theatre. It guides patrons through registration with the Nimbus Disability Access Card scheme and connects the booking process for accessibility tickets to the venue’s actual ticketing flow. For patrons new to the scheme, who often have a complicated set of questions and a real reason to need careful answers, the difference between a generic chatbot reply and a structured skill walkthrough is significant.
A few things to know before you start
Skills are not magic. They are well-described processes, run consistently. Where the underlying process is unclear or contested, where staff disagree on what should happen, a skill cannot resolve that for you. The work of writing a skill includes the work of agreeing what the policy or process actually is, in plain language, before it is encoded.
Skills also do not replace human judgement. Both skills running on Karo today include defined handover points: cases where the patron is told the agent cannot complete the task, and a member of staff is brought in. That is by design. The cases that benefit from human attention are surfaced cleanly, not hidden.
New skills can be added as venues identify processes that warrant them. A skill is a venue-specific package of rules and instructions, not a one-size-fits-all module. The skills that work at one venue can be adapted for another, but the policy text and threshold settings remain yours to define.
What this changes
The shift from functions to skills is a shift from “the agent can do things” to “the agent can run a process”. For venue managers, this is the difference between a chatbot that helps and an agent that participates in operations.
If you want to see Karo’s current skills working, or talk through what a skill for your own venue could look like, book a conversation with the team.