Foundations of AI Agents and Automation

Curious about how AI can do more than just chat? Go beyond basic prompts and learn to create intelligent agents that can reason, plan, and take action to solve real-world problems. This course provides a clear, text-based path to understanding and building your first AI agents. You will learn the core principles of agentic AI, from integrating large language models to enabling them with tools and memory. By the end, you'll be equipped to design simple automated workflows and build agents that can interact with data and APIs to perform useful tasks. What you'll learn: - Understand the fundamental components of an AI agent: the core model, memory, planning, and tools. - Learn to process and understand natural language to extract key information for your agents. - Integrate large language models (LLMs) to serve as the reasoning engine for your applications. - Implement tool-use and function-calling capabilities to allow agents to interact with external systems. - Build agents that can access and reason over private documents using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). - Practice designing and constructing simple, task-oriented agents to automate common workflows. The course begins with the essential concepts of AI agents and Natural Language Processing, then progresses through hands-on exercises where you'll apply these principles to build increasingly capable agents. This course is designed for complete beginners. No prior experience in AI or machine learning is required, though a basic familiarity with programming concepts will be helpful for the practical exercises. Start reading today and take your first step into the world of intelligent automation.