DeepLearning.AI Agentic AI Course in 29 Minutes
By Tina Huang
Summary
## Key takeaways - **Agentic AI: A Spectrum, Not Binary**: Andrew Ng's Agentic AI course rejects the binary 'agent or not agent' debate, framing agentic AI as a spectrum of autonomy. As long as a process involves multiple steps, it's considered agentic, allowing builders to choose the desired level of autonomy. [03:52] - **Core Building Blocks: Models, Tools, and Evaluations**: Agentic AI systems are built upon three core components: models (like LLMs or multimodal AI), tools (APIs, databases, code execution), and evaluations (mechanisms to assess performance). These elements are chained together to achieve a defined goal. [04:42], [08:30] - **Evals: The Crucial, Often Overlooked Piece**: Evaluations (or evals) are critical for improving AI agents, yet often overlooked. They provide objective or subjective metrics to assess performance, enabling developers to identify weaknesses and systematically enhance agent behavior. [08:37], [16:30] - **Design Patterns: Reflection and Tool Use**: Two key agentic design patterns are reflection, where an AI revises its own output for improvement, and tool use, which grants agents access to external capabilities like APIs or databases to perform tasks beyond their core model functions. [12:25], [13:38] - **Advanced Patterns: Planning and Multi-Agent Systems**: More autonomous and experimental patterns include planning, where an agent first devises a step-by-step strategy before execution, and multi-agent systems, where specialized agents collaborate to achieve a complex goal, mirroring a company structure. [24:29], [26:54]
Topics Covered
- Agentic AI: A Spectrum, Not a Binary Definition
- Translate Human Tasks into Agentic AI Workflows
- Evaluations: The Missing Piece for Agentic AI Success
- Leverage Design Patterns for Predictable AI Agent Results
- Unleash AI Magic with Highly Autonomous Agent Patterns
Full Transcript
I took Andrew Ning's agentic AI course
for you. So, here's the cliffnotes
version to save you the eight hours.
I've been really looking forward to this
one, but it is not enough for you just
listen to me talk about stuff. So, at
the end of this video, I have included a
little assessment because research shows
that immediately reviewing information
after you learn it is the best way to
retain that information. Now, without
further ado, let's go. A portion of this
video is sponsored by HubSpot Media.
Let's first go over the structure of the
course. The Agentic AI course has five
modules. Module one, introduction to
Agentic Workflows, covers the
foundations of Agentic AI and is what
the rest of the course is built on top
of. Module two is a deep dive into the
reflection pattern, a common pattern for
agentic workflows. Module three covers
tool use, another common agentic
pattern. The course also covers lots of
examples and ways to improve the
results. Module four is called practical
tips for building agentic AI. And this
module is by far the most important
module. I have not seen this information
especially on evaluations being covered
to this depth anywhere else. It's what
everybody talks about but nobody has
actually really covered it well and this
course does it well. And finally module
five is patterns for highly autonomous
agents where Andrew covers more
experimental agentic workflows a taste
for the future.
All right let's jump into module one the
fundamentals starting off by defining
agentic AI. An agentic AI workflow is
defined as a process where an LLM based
app executes multiple steps to complete
a task. For example, if you want your
agentic AI workflow to help you write an
essay on tea ceremonies.
First, the LM will need to come up with
an essay outline about tea ceremonies.
Then, it will need to think to itself,
do I need any web research? It decides
that it does, and it will then do
research on tea ceremonies across
different locations and across different
times. Next, it would then write a first
draft, but that's not good enough. It
would then consider what parts would
need more revision and more research.
Maybe it would even request a human
review at this point if it's really
quite unsure about tea ceremonies. Then
finally, it would revise the draft and
have the final draft ready. This is an
example of an angentic AI workflow that
is less autonomous since it's quite
clear what the steps are to be taken in
order to get the final result, but you
can also have more autonomous agents,
too.
Using the same essay writing agentic
workflow and a more autonomous workflow
would look something like you similarly
tell the LM to you know write an essay
about tea ceremonies but instead of
directing it to go write an outline and
then do the web research and then etc
etc you can just give the LM a set of
tools like web search and news search
and maybe archive search for more
research papers too and you let the LM
itself decide which tool it's going to
use to gather the right information find
the best sources compile it together
then write it the essay draft. It will
also have the autonomy of how it's going
to reflect on how it is that you can
improve things, whether it wants to call
a human reviewer or not until the agent
itself feels satisfied and produces the
final result. It's the same input and
the output that you want is the same as
well. But you can see that one is very
linear and the steps are well very well
defined, less autonomous, and you have
the much more autonomous version where
the agent has access to tools and a lot
more freedom to decide how it's going to
get to that final essay.
There's of course pros and cons to being
less autonomous versus more autonomous.
Like if you're less autonomous, the
steps are predefined. They're clear and
most of all, you have a lot more control
over what is happening and the final
result. On the other hand, if something
is more autonomous, the agent gets to
make a lot more decisions for itself and
you can end up with really creative,
really great results that are beyond
what you imagined. But the downside is
that you would then have less control
and it could also potentially come up
with results that may not be what you're
looking for at all. In any case, with
agentic AI workflows, there is this
spectrum of autonomy that you, the
person building the agentic workflow,
gets to choose how autonomous you want
it to be. Very explicitly though, Andrew
in the course emphasizes that he rejects
this notion of like a binary something
is either an agent or it's not an agent,
which is pretty much like what the
people on X has been debating about for
like the past 2 years. What is actually
considered an agent? But Andrew is
basically like, no guys, no guys, still
just don't think about it that way,
okay? Let's just call things like
agentic AI and as long as it involves
multiple steps, it's agentic AI and you
can just be on the spectrum of least
autonomous to more autonomous.
Paraphrasing a little bit here. Anyways,
what we all can agree on though is if
you wrap a LM, a model in an agentic
workflow, it is going to be much better
than just calling it directly. This is a
fact. It would also be often times
faster and more modular, meaning that
you can change things a lot more easily.
So that is why agentic AI is so popular
and very much worth building.
Okay, let's now cover from a practical
perspective. What are the building
blocks of Agentic AI? Andrew's building
blocks for Agentic AI is pretty
simplistic actually. It involves just
three components. Let's start off by
addressing the first two which is models
and tools. Models just refers to the AI
model. That can be large language models
or it can be like other types of AI
models, multimodm models like video
generation models, audio generation
models, any type of model. And then
there are tools which are basically
functions and capabilities that you're
giving your AI agent so that it's able
to perform different types of task.
Examples of this would include being
able to use external software through
their APIs. Stuff like web search,
getting real-time data, being able to
check emails, things like that.
Information retrieval, so being able to
access certain types of databases, and
code execution, being able to write code
to be able to do things like math, data
analysis, building stuff. So all of
these are tools. There is also a third
component which I will talk about in a
little bit because when you are first
thinking about creating an agentic
system, you're really just thinking
about how do you take these building
blocks of different models and different
tools and chain them together and put
them together in such a way to achieve
the results that you want. For example,
say you want to develop an agentic AI
system with the goal to respond to a
customer email for your company. This is
an example of the type of email that you
may get. Subject line here is wrong item
ship. It's like, "Hi, I ordered a Blue
Kitchen Pro blender. Here's the order
number, but received a red toaster
instead. I need a blender for my
daughter's birthday party this weekend.
Can you help?" Susan Jones. If you want
to create an AI workflow that's able to
accomplish this task, the easiest way to
do this is actually think to yourself,
how would I go about accomplishing this
task? Like, how would a human do this?
Okay, so the first step would be you
need to extract key information,
including the order number, the fact
that it was supposed to be a Blue
Kitchen Pro blender, but they got a red
toaster instead, and the timeline. The
daughter's birthday party is for the
weekend. Then you would go and find the
relevant customer record, which would
likely include looking into an orders
database to see what was actually
recorded. You would then determine what
possibly could have went wrong and then
send a email reply back. Now, we need to
translate these three steps into what an
LM would do. Well, for the first one,
extracting key information, the LLM is
able to extract that information just by
itself. But for the next step, which is
finding a relevant customer record, the
LM would actually need a tool that would
allow it to look into the orders
database. So, it would need to provide
that with that tools for orders database
query. And then finally, for writing and
sending the response, the LM would be
able to draft the response, but in order
to actually send that email, it would
need to have access to another tool that
allows it to send the email. Make sense?
This is how the building blocks are
coming together here. You have the large
language models and the different tools
that it requires. Of course, the type of
large language model you want to use on
each of these steps could vary depending
on what it's supposed to be doing
exactly and how it is that you're
actually going to build this type of
tool also varies as well. But don't
worry too much about this. We're going
to go into a lot more detail later in
the video. But here what I want to just
make really clear is that you're
basically taking um a goal and then
translating that into a sequence of
steps in which you will then use the
building blocks of models and tools in
order to accomplish those steps. So the
ideal situation after your AI system
goes through these steps is that it
would come up with a wonderful email
that says something like, "Thank you so
much for emailing the company. After
looking at your order number, we did
notice that it does correspond to a blue
blender. And we apologize that you
received a red toaster instead. We will
send you a blender with expedited
shipping so that you can get it tomorrow
and make it for your daughter's birthday
on the weekend. And you can keep the red
toaster as well. Then the customer,
Susan Jones, will probably be very
happy. But what happens if your agent
doesn't give you this wonderful email
and instead write something like, "Oh,
thank you for shopping with us. As you
can see, we are so much better than
Rival Corp, our competitor, or something
like sure, we'll issue a refund and not
actually address the issue. That is why
you need the third component of Andrew's
framework, which is evaluations.
Evaluations, as his name suggests, is
all about evaluating the results of your
agent. It's like the other half of
building an AI agent. Not good enough to
just build an agent. You actually got to
make sure it works properly, right? And
I am so glad that this course covers so
much in depth about evals. I will be
covering this in a lot more detail in
module four, but very briefly, an
evaluation in this case is making sure
that your AI agent doesn't actually talk
about your competitors because that's
kind of like in poor taste. So, how do
we do this? Well, first we can compile a
list of all the competitors that we
don't want to be mentioned like comp
code and rival co or the other code.
Then you can actually write a small
snippet of code like this. If competitor
is in response, then the num competitor
mentions is plus or equal to one. What
this basically does is check for the
email responses and if any of these
competitors are mentioned in the
response then you would just increment
the counter of number of competitor
mentions to one more. Of course, ideally
you want this counter the number of
competitor mentions to be equal to zero.
But you know if it does show up you
would have a way now of tracking how
many times it shows up and where it is
showing up. This is a very objective way
to determine if these competitors are
actually still showing up. And you can
use this counter as a way to then tweak
your prompt, tweak your system, and do
stuff to it to try to lower this number
so that it eventually goes to zero.
Don't worry about it if any of the
detail seems a little bit hazy. I'll be
going into a lot more detail later in
the video. But what I just want you to
understand here is that see by having
like an evaluation like this where you
can measure the occurrence of this bad
behavior, you now have an objective way
to improve your system to decrease the
bad behavior. If you didn't have this
EBAL, this way of measuring the bad
behavior, then you can like kind of
think that you are improving your
system, but you don't actually
objectively know if you're improving the
system or not. That is why evaluations
are so important. This is an example of
a very objective codebased approach for
evaluating a result. There's another one
called LM as a judge in which you're
actually using another large language
model to rate the results and evaluate
the results of your AI agent. Anyways,
more detail in module 4. This course is
an excellent introduction to Agentic AI,
but when you're ready to start building
your own AI agents with business impact,
there are many other factors that you do
need to consider, which is why I highly
recommend that you check out the free
master AI agents resource from HubSpot
Media. It provides good practical
frameworks and examples on how to get
started with building useful AI agents
with business impact. It also includes
real use cases in marketing, sales, and
operations that you can directly use to
start implementing your own agents to be
able to do things like content
production optimization, process large
amounts of data, do customized outreach,
and much, much more. There's also a
second download and resource called how
to use AI agents that has an excellent
checklist to guide your organization
through each phase of implementing AI
agents. This is so useful and it's
something that we actually use in our
company whenever we're launching a new
agent. Really recommend you check out
the resource linked over here also in
description. Thank you so much Hopsoft
Media for providing practical free
resources on building AI agents and for
sponsoring this portion of the video.
Now back to the video. But first, let's
move on to modules two and three which
are covering what are known as agentic
design patterns. And what are agentic
design patterns you may ask? Well,
remember we talked about earlier about
sending that email for the blender and a
toaster. Got to first decompose that
task and then translate that into a
combination of large language model and
tool use. So you could just kind of like
figure that out yourself with any type
of task that you want your agentic AI to
do. But luckily, we do have a lot of
precedence now for specific types of
task and specific types of design
patterns like how it is that we're
decomposing it and fitting together the
pieces that has proven to shown really
good results because more likely than
not, whatever it is that you're trying
to accomplish will converge to one of
these design patterns. In this course,
Andrew covers four design patterns. two
that are less autonomous and two that
are more experimental, more autonomous.
Let's now talk about the first design
pattern, which is reflection. The
reflection design pattern is super
intuitive. For example, if you tell a
human, hey, go write this email, and
they're like, you know, distracted or
something and maybe they just like had
lunch, so they just write some sloppy
email. But if you go like, hey, reflect
on this and improve the email, probably
the result you're going to get is going
to be a lot better. Exactly the same
with AI. If you tell an AI to write an
email, it will first do a first draft,
which might not be that great. But if
you tell it to go back and reflect on it
and improve it, you will end up having
much better results. The second step,
asking to reflect on it and come up with
another draft, is literally the
reflection design pattern. Simple but
powerful. And remember how it is that
way you can actually go about tweaking
this and improving the systematically is
by having the whole like evaluation
section. The course also provides like
code examples of how to implement design
patterns like the reflection pattern,
which you can see over here, but I'm not
going to go into too much detail about
this. You can actually go and try out
the implementation with code if you want
to in the course. It's actually free to
get this code. So, I'll link it in the
description. By the way, don't be
discouraged and like rage quit right now
if you don't know how to code. Um, this
is absolutely doable with no code as
well. They just don't show it in the
course. Like, we teach the full no code
approach for doing this in our agents
boot camp ourselves. I also do have a
video over here that covers the basics
of how to implement um agents using no
code approach too.
Okay, let's go on to the second design
pattern called tool use. So, this part I
did get like a little confused because
we did talk about tools uh when we
talked about the building blocks, right,
of like models and tools and and
evaluations, but I think Andrew included
this as like a full-on design pattern
because he wanted to emphasize like how
much tool use can elevate the
performance of an agent. So, we'll go
through it. Firstly, to define tool use,
you're letting your agent have access to
tools that's able to implement and do
certain things that it normally cannot
do just as a model itself. For example,
if you have an agentic AI workflow in
which you want to be like booking
meetings and stuff, you would need to
give your agent access to a calendar
booking tool. What tool use? You can
make it like very strict telling your
agent that you have to use this exact
tool to do this exact thing or you can
make it more autonomous and give your
agents more like a selection of tools
that it can choose from and they can get
to choose which tool it wants to use to
accomplish a task. But whatever tools it
is that you choose to give your AI agent
and how much you restrict how it's using
the tools. The key here is that you do
need to define the tools and you need to
let your agent know that you gave them
access to these tools and what the tools
are in the system itself. Or else your
agent would just be like what is this? I
don't know what this is. Like for
example, if you have a personal
assistant agentic AI system and you tell
it to find a free slot on Thursday in my
calendar and make an appointment with
Alice, you would need to give it tools
such as make appointment, check calendar
and delete appointment and tell it in
the system prompt you have access to the
tools make appointment which is for
making an appointment booking. Check
calendar which is for checking a
calendar to check for availabilities.
Delete appointment in order to delete
existing appointments. then you can tell
your agent to like you know find that
time slot between you and Alice and it
should be able to use the tools at his
disposal in order to accomplish the
task.
So how it is that you can actually
define these tools for your agents.
There's actually quite a few different
ways of doing this. The most simple
approach if you're using code is to
literally just like write a function for
it and then give it access to your AI
agent through some type of framework. Um
the example that they showed in the
course is called the AI suite, but
there's like a lot of other frameworks
that you can use as well. Not going to
go into too much detail about this, but
if you are interested in implementing
this, there is an assignment in the
course as well, which I will link in the
description. So yeah, keep that in mind.
Angie also explains that there's other
ways for you to give your agent tools as
well. For example, through something
called MCP, which is the model context
protocol. This is a protocol that was
developed by Anthropic that standardizes
the way that tools are being defined so
that it's very easy for agents to have
access to different tools without having
to like write custom functions for all
of them. MCPS are actually really cool.
A lot of developers are actually
building MCPs and like selling their
MCPs and stuff like that as well. So, if
you are interested in learning more
about it, I do have a full video which
I'll link over here that goes into the
depths of MCP. But for now, let's move
on to the much anticipated module 4,
practical tips for building agentic AI,
where we talk a lot now about
evaluations, the missing piece of
agentic AI development and what makes
this course so valuable. To properly
define it, evaluations or evals are
agent evaluation mechanisms that refer
to processes and criteria used to assess
the performance of agents within a
system. We already talked about why we
need evals and why it is the third major
building block because you can build an
AI agent, but how do you even know how
good it is and how do you know how to
improve it if you don't measure the
results of it? And that is where eval
come in. For example, say you have an
invoice extraction agent. So you give
the system PDF invoices which then it
converts to text. Then the LM extracts
four required fields like the biller,
biller address, amount, due, and due
date. It has access to a tool called
update database which will then use in
order to update the database with a new
invoice and the record is created.
Simple linear agentic workflow here.
Now, if we want to evaluate this agentic
system, one approach of doing this is to
just now take 10 to 20 different
invoices and then feed it through the
agent and then make a record of the
results. You might notice that invoice
one was fine. um it was able to extract
the four required fields and everything
is great but you found that invoice 2 it
actually mixed up the dates between the
due date and the invoice date. Uh
invoice 3 was okay as well and then you
keep on going and you find that invoice
19 it also makes up the dates and
invoice 20 it makes up the dates as
well. This is actually the most
practical way of doing this. So from
collecting this data you notice that one
of the tendencies of this agentic
workflow is that it mixes up dates which
is not good. We actually want to improve
that. So we want to build an eval for
this to set as a metric for us to
improve. One thing to note here is that
often times you don't actually know what
eval that you should be building before
you actually build out your system and
start running examples through it. It's
actually kind of hard to think through
like what are the potential like places
of failure for your system until you try
it out. So that's why I do like general
recommendation is just like build
something quickly, quick and dirty and
then just like start passing through
different examples and collecting that
data to decide what the eval should be.
Say we want to create an eval now for
date extraction because we notice that
it gets a date extraction wrong a lot.
How do we go about doing this? Well,
step number one is to manually extract
the due dates from the 10 to 20 invoices
that you pass through. Then you want to
specify the output format of the data in
the prompt itself. So then you can
extract the date from the LM response
using code and finally compare the large
language model results to the ground
truth. Does the extracted data equal to
the actual data? This is an example of
evaluation that uses code if you
actually want to implement evaluation
using code yourself. By the way, also in
the course there is the code for this
that you can run yourself.
Anyways, this is an example of a ebal
that you can implement so that in the
future as you're like tweaking your
prompt and then changing things around,
you can actually measure if your invoice
agent system is becoming more accurate
or less accurate at date extraction.
Hopefully more accurate. There are a lot
of other types of doing it. And the way
that the course frames it is that you
can think about evals as falling under
two different axes. This date extraction
eval is an example of an objective eval
because the result of it is that the
extracted date is either equal to the
actual date or it's not equal to the
actual date. Very objective either right
or wrong. With this type of eval system,
you can usually implement it pretty
easily just through code itself. Another
type of eval is a subjective eval. This
is when the result isn't just like a yes
or no binary kind of situation. An
example of a subject eval is if you're
trying to say assess the results of a
research agent. The agent is supposed to
research on a certain topic and then
output like some sort of essay at the
end. Say if you give it a prompt like
research and write an essay about recent
black hole science. There's no way to
objectively evaluate how good the
research and how good the essay ends up.
You can't just like, you know, count the
number of words or something like that,
right? So, what you need to do to create
this kind of email is first choose a few
different topics that you're going to be
using as the prompt. Like maybe
something about buck coal, something
about robot harvesting, renting versus
buying a home in Seattle, etc., etc. So,
for each of these prompts, you need to
actually manually establish a ground
truth annotation, which are like golden
standard talking points that you know
needs to be researched and needs to be
part of the final essay as well. For
example, with black holes, these could
be stuff like event horizon or radio
telescope. for robotic harvesting. It
could be like robo pick and pinchers. To
actually do this, you probably need to
like find someone who actually knows
these topics or you yourself know these
topics as well. So, this part is manual.
But then the second part is when you can
use the LM as a judge. So, you have
another type of LM to count how many of
these topics actually appear in the
research and the final results. The
reason why you need to use an LLM to to
count this and not just like um
objectively use code to count this is
because a certain term can appear in a
lot of different iterations. Like the
term event horizon could be like event
horizon, but it could also be like
uppercase, lower case, could be the
horizon on the type of event at the
horizon or like when the horizon is near
something like that, right? There's like
so many different types of iterations of
this that you need an LLM to be able to
capture all the different types of these
iterations. Then you can get the LM to
give you a final score for each prompt
based upon how many of these terms were
captured in the final result. This on
screen now is an example of a prompt for
the LM as a judge. That's the first axis
of this 2x2 matrix uh for the different
types of evals. And this one is
objective versus subjective. The second
axis is whether something has a perample
ground truth or does not have a perample
ground truth. Both the examples that we
just talked about, the invoice example
and the LM research and essay writing
example are agenting systems that have a
perample ground truth. This means that
for every example like every input that
we give there is a established ground
truth for that example. like the invoice
extraction has a specific date that is
the correct result that is different for
all the different examples and the
topics for the research agent are
different for each of the examples too.
However, you can also have emails that
have no perample ground truth meaning
that there's a singular universal
standard that is there for every single
example. Say if you have an agentic
system that is for marketing copy length
um and you just want to make sure that
the marketing copy length is always
going to be less than 10 words. So like
the number 10 is like the universal
magical number. This is also an
objective eval. So you can actually
write code. So you can literally just
write if the length of the text is less
than or equal to 10, then that is good.
If it's not, then it's bad. The final
quadrant of this 2x2 matrix is when you
have something that is subjective and
does not have a per example ground
truth. Say you have an agentic system
that is supposed to create different
graphs. The judging of the graph is
going to be subjective. The result of
the graph is going to be subjective. And
the way that you judge it is going to be
based off this universal criteria where
you would ask the LM as a judge to grade
the graph to see whether it has axis
labels. Are the colors easy to see? Is
there any overlapping text? Etc., etc.,
etc. So, that would be like a universal
grading criteria.
Okay, great. That covers the four
general types of of evals that you can
make. Some of the tips that the course
suggests when you're creating these
evals, uh firstly is to just quick and
dirty is okay to start. just create
something and then just create some
evals and just get started like that.
You you can always continue to expand
the set of evals. You want to try to use
a lot of different types of examples to
try to capture all the different types
of errors that you can change into
evals. And finally, you want to look for
places where the performance of the
agentic system is worse than a humans.
These are the best areas for
improvement. Great. That was the module
on evals. Even if you implement just
like a few of these different evals,
you'll be setting up a system that will
help you dramatically improve the
results of your agents. I feel like
evals are such an open secret and by
implementing them, massive return on
investment.
All right, we're almost done. We are at
module five, which is the patterns for
highly autonomous agents. We're going to
be covering two of the more experimental
agents that are also more autonomous.
The two patterns that we covered
earlier, reflection and tool use, are
less autonomous and they're more
predictable. While for these
experimental ones, planning and multi-
aent systems, these are less
predictable, less controllable, but if
you get it right, the results can be
really, really good. Let's start off
with planning and jump straight to an
example. Say you have a customer service
agent in which it has an inventory
database of different types of products
in a store. You have like ID, name,
description, price, and stock. An
example of a customer query that the
agent would receive would be like, do
you have any round sunglasses in stock
that are under $100? So you see this is
actually a pretty difficult query
because it involves the customer survey
agent to have to go through the data set
and first like find what are the round
styles. Then they has to go pick out
which of these are in stock and finally
which of these prices are going to be
under $100 to be able to come up with
the final answer of yes we have our
classic sunglasses which are classic
round metal frame and cost $60. And of
course this is just a single example of
the kind of questions that customers
will be asking. There's a broad range of
questions that will be asked and that
can be answered by using this database.
However, there is no like set path for
you to actually answer these questions.
Each time you would have to figure out
and plan out what is the way to actually
answer these questions. This is where
the planning design pattern comes in.
Going back to that example of asking a
question, do you have any round
sunglasses in stock that are under $100?
The planning design pattern will first
have an LLM figure out what is the
actual plan to answer this question
given the set of tools that it has. Like
it has tools like get item descriptions,
check inventory, process item return etc
etc. So it would use this information
and the information of the database and
come up with a plan like number one have
to use get item description tool to find
the round sunglasses. Second step is to
use check inventory to see if results
are in stock. Then third step is to use
get item price to see if in stock
results are less than $100. Then the
agent will take that plan and execute
each of these steps to get the final
result. By the way, if you want to dig
into this and actually implement these
evals yourself, there is again
assignments that you can try out in the
course which I will link below. What is
cool about this planning design pattern
is that the plan is not predetermined.
So the agenda system has to actually
figure out the plan first and then go
and execute all of it. Which means of
course that the downside of this
planning design pattern is that you
don't actually know what the plan is. So
it's actually very hard to troubleshoot
and anticipate what kind of result
you're going to get until it actually
goes through the process itself. The
upside of this is this increased amount
of flexibility and sometimes like it is
pretty magical to witness an agent be
able to plan out super complex tasks and
then execute it and get like crazy good
results. This is the kind of magic that
more autonomous systems have. Less
control but more probability of really
cool results.
The other more experimental autonomous
design pattern is a multi-agentic
workflow. The idea of a multi- aent
system is to take an agentic system and
actually have it like be multiple
different agents working together to
produce the final result. The intuition
for why this can be better is kind of
like a company, right? If you have like
one person trying to do all the
different tasks in a company, um it's
probably not going to do the best job
and it's going to get overwhelmed
because it has to do like so many
different things and juggle so many
different things at the same time. But
if you have different people in that
company that specialize in different
things, each person would be able to
focus better on their specific task. and
when you put it together, it's going to
produce a better result. That's why we
usually have multiple people in a
company and not just like the CEO trying
to do everything themselves. So that's
the same intuition for developing
multi-agentic systems. For example, say
you have a marketing team agentic system
and instead of just having one agent,
you actually divide that into three
different sub aents. A researcher, a
graphic designer, and a writer. So that
when you receive a query like create a
summer marketing campaign for
sunglasses, your research agent will
focus on conducting research and figure
out that here are current sunglasses
trends and competitor offerings. It
would pass along that information to a
graphic designer agent which would then
come up with like five different data
visualizations and five different
artwork options for the report. It would
then pass all of this to the final
writer agent which will then compile
everything together and write the final
report. So this would be a marketing
team agentic system that's able to
generate report for a marketing campaign
on a specific topic. There's actually
quite a lot of research done on multi-
aent systems and in our boot camp as
well like we have a whole week that
covers multi- aent systems because the
results can be really really good like
much much better uh than if you just use
a single agent. This course doesn't
cover too much into it though but I will
leave a link in the description for an
anthropic article that goes into a lot
more detail about multi-agent systems. I
also have a video that covers multi-
aent systems as well which you can check
out at this link over here if you prefer
like a video approach. Anyways, for this
course they also have codebased
assignments where you can implement
these more autonomous systems too. Oh my
god. Okay, we have come to the end of
this video of this crash course. I
literally had let's see 93 pages of
notes which I have condensed for you
guys here. I overall I think this course
really was quite good. It has a very
good overview of all of the different
parts um for building agentic AI. My
critique though, if I may, Andrew does
approach it from a very like researchy
theoretical perspective, which makes
sense given his background as like a
research scientist, but I do feel like
he didn't really cover like the actual
process of deployment and what does that
actually look like when you put it into
the world and get users to start using
your agents and stuff like that. That's
like a whole other beast which we cover
a lot in our boot camps because we're
coming from like a more practical
approach so that we're building these
agents and actually deploying them and
people are using them and you know
you're hopefully making money from them
as well. Another critique that I do have
um is that the assignments here they're
all like based upon code. If you didn't
know any better you would have the
misconception that you have to know how
to code in order to implement these
systems and that is not true. So I just
want to like make that super clear for
you guys too. You can do this with no
code as well. I'll link in description
some of the videos that I cover where
you can implement these systems with no
code completely.
All right, as promised, here is the
little assessment in which if you can
answer these questions, then
congratulations. You are going to be
able to retain all the information we've
just covered from this 8hour course.
Please write your answers in the
comments. All right, thank you so much
for watching until the end of this
video. I really hope that you learned a
lot about Agentic AI and you're super
excited to start building your own
agents as well. And I will see you guys
in next video or live stream.
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