Mefta Sadat from Loblaw Digital discusses Alfred, an agentic orchestration layer designed to run AI shopping agents reliably in production. He covers the architecture built with LangGraph and GCP, the role of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in simplifying API interaction, and practical MLOps strategies for observability, cost management, and ensuring reliability.
A panel discussion with experts from Arcade, Prosus Group, and MeaningStack who argue that most teams are building agents incorrectly. They dissect the failures of simple API wrappers, the pros and cons of MCP, and the critical role of governance and organizational structure in deploying agents successfully.
Sam Partee, CTO of Arcade AI, explains that building production-grade agentic systems requires moving beyond simple chatbots. He details the critical components for creating reliable, secure, and scalable tools, including rigorous schema management, the principle of least privilege, continuous evaluation, and a crucial distinction between 'exploratory' and 'operational' tools.
Sam Partee, CTO of Arcade, explains the critical gap between AI agents that gather context and those that take secure, real-world actions. He introduces Arcade as a middleware platform that solves complex challenges like user authorization, fine-grained permissions, and token management, enabling developers to build scalable, enterprise-ready agents.
A deep dive into OpenAI's AgentKit, demonstrating how to visually build, deploy, and optimize multi-step, tool-calling agents using Agent Builder, ChatKit, and the integrated Evals platform.
Explore the distinction between LLMs and AI agents, focusing on how agents leverage reasoning, tool calling, and the ReAct prompting framework for autonomous decision-making and task execution in complex business workflows.