A common misconception about O’Reilly is that we cater only to the deeply technical learner. While we’re proud of our deep roots in the tech community, the breadth of our offerings, both in books and on our learning platform, has always aimed to reach a broader audience of tech-adjacent and tech-curious people who want to learn new technologies and skills to improve how they work. For this audience, generative AI has opened up a world of new capabilities, making it possible to contribute to technical work that previously required coding knowledge or specialized expertise. As Tim O’Reilly has put it, “the addressable surface area of programming has gone up by orders of magnitude. There’s so much more to do and explore.”
Over the last few years, many in this less technical audience have become adept at using chatbots in their daily lives for summarizing, writing, data analysis, automating tedious tasks and even prototyping. But this proficiency with chatbots is just the beginning. The underlying technology has evolved beyond simple conversations and outputs to power the next step: AI agents.
While chatbots are great for answering questions and generating outputs, AI agents are designed to take action. They are proactive, goal-oriented, and can handle complex, multi-step tasks. If we’re often encouraged to think of chatbots as bright but overconfident interns, we can think of AI agents like competent direct reports you can hand an entire project to. They’ve been trained, understand their goals, can make decisions and employ tools to achieve their ends, all with minimal oversight. Across industries, agents are already handling real work, from automating software development to managing complex marketing campaigns and customer service calls. But there’s a gap. Many people who are comfortable with chatbots don’t yet see the path to harnessing the power of agents in their everyday work. They’ve heard the hype but how can agents impact daily work? How do you get started?
This is why we’ve created the October 23rd GenAI Superstream: Everyday AI Agents. This event is designed to bridge that gap and show you how to move from simply chatting with AI to building and deploying AI agents that can become valuable co-workers. Kathy Pham (VP of AI at Workday) and Claire Vo (CEO at ChatPRD) will kick off the conference with a fireside chat about how agents are already changing work and why it matters. From there, we’ll get into the specifics. You’ll hear from Jacob Bank of Relay.app, who will help demystify agents and share real patterns for automating your work, and from April Dunnam of Microsoft, who will demonstrate how to build agents directly within Microsoft 365. You’ll also learn how agents can help designers enforce creative governance with Nadia Elinbabi of Lowes and manage complex product workflows with Aman Khan of Arize AI. David Griffiths of HereScreen will explain how thinking like a programmer—without needing to be one—can help you design more intelligent and flexible agents. Finally, Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant will talk about how individual agents can evolve into multi-agent ecosystems that manage complex operations across an entire enterprise. Together, the goal of these presentations is to show vivid instances of real-world agents in action, inspiring you to imagine how you might use agents to augment your own abilities and work smarter.
Democratization of technical capabilities is one of the key benefits of the current sea change ushered in by genAI. We believe that everyone, regardless of their technical background, should have the opportunity to participate in this transformation. Whether you’re new to agents, feel like your experimentation with agents has plateaued, or you just want a measured assessment of the hype, this GenAI Superstream is your chance to get informed, be inspired, and take the first steps toward building your own AI-powered future. We hope you’ll join us.
