Building AI Agents and Agentic Systems

Up to this point, we’ve constructed various parts of AI agent systems in isolation. We’ve built simple agents, extended their abilities with tools, added memory and knowledge bases, orchestrated multiple agents together, and learned how to manage models and guardrails. Now, in this final chapter, we’re going to put all of these pieces together. The goal is for you to design full, end-to-end agent solutions that leverage everything you’ve learned throughout this book.

Here is what you will learn as part of this chapter:

• Building a customer service employee AI agent: First, we will build a virtual customer service assistant that integrates secure database queries, knowledge base lookups, and input guardrails, and even hands off to a retention specialist agent when needed. This case study will show how to combine tools and multi-agent handoffs in a single coherent system.
• Orchestrating an automated...