Agent skills

When an external agent discovers Rovo via the Agent Card, it sees a list of skills - high-level capabilities that describe what Rovo can do. Unlike MCP tools, which are individual API operations, A2A skills represent broader task categories that Rovo can handle through natural language.

How skills work

Skills are advertised in the Agent Card's skills array. Each skill has:

• id — A unique identifier for the skill.
• name — A human-readable name.
• description — What the skill does and when to use it.
• tags — Keywords for categorization and discovery.
• examples — Example prompts that demonstrate the skill.

External agents use this information to decide when to delegate tasks to Rovo. See Supported JSON-RPC methods for the methods the gateway accepts. Use message/stream for any request that may run longer than approximately 30 seconds.

Available skills (static fallback card)

Work in Jira

Example prompts:

• "Summarize the status of all open Jira work items assigned to me. Include ticket links and context ordered by priority and deadline, highlighting any critical details."
• "List my Jira issues in "Blocked" status, ordered by due date. Include the reason they are blocked, the last update made, and their project links."
• "Create a new Jira work item in the project [project name] based on this project brief [project brief link]. The work item should include a summary, description, acceptance criteria, and priority."
• "Provide a list of tips to maximize productivity when using Jira across different Atlassian apps. Include detailed examples and prompts, ensuring each one specifies a clear goal, relevant context, and expected outcome."

Work in Confluence

Example prompts:

• "Draft a report for Confluence summarizing the key updates and additions I made over the past week. For each significant update or addition, create a subsection with a brief explanation, focusing only on the essential information"
• "Create a Confluence page with all open Jira tickets assigned to me, ordered by priority and deadline. For each ticket, include a direct link, priority level (High, Medium, Low), deadline, and any relevant context or updates."
• "Find Confluence pages related to [customer name]. Summarize each of the pages, highlighting the main ideas and key points that would be important for my upcoming conversation."

Dynamic vs. static skills

The Agent Card, and therefore its skills list, can come from two sources:

1. Dynamic — Fetched from the downstream Rovo service, which provides the canonical agent identity and skills. The gateway caches this for 5 minutes and hydrates it with local auth config.
2. Static fallback — If the downstream service is unavailable, the gateway serves a hardcoded Agent Card with the skills listed above.

Skills vs. MCP tools

Input and output modes

The static fallback card advertises:

• Input modes: text/plain
• Output modes: text/plain

The live dynamic card may advertise different modes. The Rovo Agent Adapter currently extracts text from text parts only — file and data parts are accepted but not processed. Support for additional content types may be added in future releases.

Next steps

• Architecture — Review the Agent Card fields and caching behavior.
• Getting started — Send your first message to Rovo.
• Authentication — Learn how agents authenticate before invoking these skills.