AI Agents at Work: Build Day-to-Day Workflows for Productivity

Most professionals use AI as a chatbot, asking isolated questions and moving on. But the real productivity gains come when AI becomes a persistent thinking partner that understands your goals, remembers context, and supports your work over time. In this course, instructor Alex Banks shows how to design and build AI agents that function as a reliable “second brain” for your work. Explore what separates chatbots from AI agents and walk through how to plan, configure, and refine a custom AI assistant with clear instructions, boundaries, and knowledge. Along the way, Alex also covers essential privacy and data-safety guardrails to help you use AI responsibly at work. By the end of this course, you’ll be equipped with an AI assistant that helps you think better, work faster, and stay focused on what matters most.

Learning objectives
Differentiate between traditional chatbots and agentic AI systems.
Identify and analyze the core components of an AI agent including instructions, knowledge sources, and capabilities and describe how they work together.
Plan and create a clearly defined AI agent by writing effective instructions, setting boundaries, and aligning the agent to real-world tasks
Organize and apply a high-quality knowledge base by selecting relevant documents and structuring files.
Apply AI agents to common workplace scenarios: generating meeting notes, repurposing written text, and strategy evaluation.
Identify best practices for ensuring privacy and data protection while using AI agents.