Agent 101: Understanding AI Agents

In 2025, AI agents has the potential to disrupt many businesses. From coding agents to financial analyst agents, from interview agents to healthcare agents, we are seeing intelligent helpers that automate business processes and dramatically increase our productivity.

In this talk, I will review how agents work, and how to build an agent from scratch. Using the code of a live agent, I will discuss the following topics:
1. Components of an agent.
2. Tool use: How an agent calls a tool and external APIs.
3. Reasoning: How an agent reasons and enhances its answers.
4. Planning: How an agent creates sequential actions.
5. Memory: How an agent manages its long-term and short-term memory
6. Multi-agent systems: How we can put different agents to work together.
7. Evaluation and guardrail: How we evaluate the performance of an agent and create guardrails.

This talk will cover both high-level explanations and code implementation, so that you can get a comprehensive view of agents.

Presenter: Junling Hu

Join this event here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/EQ9O9gCVQqu8nw-r6BaZbQ

Agenda:
7-7:05pm Meet and Greet
7:05-8pm Presentation
8-8:30pm Q&A and Discussions