#08 OpenAI - A Practical Guide to Building Agents 2025

Are you a product or engineering team looking to harness the latest advancements in AI? Join us as we distill practical insights and best practices from numerous customer deployments, focusing on Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents.

This podcast dives into the essential aspects of building intelligent systems that can independently accomplish complex, multi-step tasks on your behalf. We'll explore:

• What defines an agent: Moving beyond simple chatbots, agents leverage LLMs to manage workflow execution, make decisions, correct actions, and interact with external systems via tools, all while operating within clearly defined guardrails.
• When to build an agent: Discover how agents are uniquely suited for workflows that have traditionally resisted automation, especially those involving complex decision-making, difficult-to-maintain rules, or heavy reliance on unstructured data.
• Agent design foundations: Understand the three core components—the LLM model powering reasoning, tools for external interactions, and clear instructions defining behavior. Learn best practices for selecting models, defining various types of tools (data, action, and even other agents), and crafting high-quality instructions that reduce ambiguity and improve decision-making.
• Orchestration patterns: Explore effective strategies for managing complexity, from single-agent systems that incrementally add tools to sophisticated multi-agent systems. We'll detail patterns like the "Manager" where a central agent coordinates specialized agents, and "Decentralized" where agents hand off tasks to one another.
• Building robust guardrails: A critical component for ensuring agents run safely and predictably. Learn about layered defense mechanisms, including relevance and safety classifiers, PII filters, moderation, tool safeguards, and rules-based protections. We'll also cover the crucial role of human intervention as a safeguard, especially early in deployment.

This podcast offers a comprehensive, actionable framework to help you confidently start building your first agent and effectively scale your AI capabilities.