This talk was presented at the AI The Docs 2025 online conference. We are thrilled to share the recording and the summary with you.
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Summary
How can we define agents? How can we think of designing and building with agents?
In his keynote presentation, Ronald Ashri (Co-Founder and the Chief Product and Technology Officer of OpenDialog.ai) explores how to reason about AI and agents with clarity and focus, helping teams design strategies before choosing technologies.
Key points:
- AI as delegation: AI is not a product but a scientific field that offers tools for delegating decision-making to machines. The real value lies in solving problems, not “having AI.”
- Agents as abstraction: Agents describe AI systems with goals, actions, and capabilities. This abstraction reduces cognitive load, supports team communication, and enables consistent patterns across domains.
- Designing with agents: Focus first on what the agent should achieve (goals, capabilities, environment) before worrying about how. Example: a documentation journey agent with goals, sensing abilities, and reasoning.
- Practical cautions: Watch for LLM reality gaps (hallucinations turning into actions). Prioritize safety, trustworthiness (explainable decisions), and compliance, especially in regulated environments.
“Agentic” marks the shift from AI models that only provide instructions to systems that act on their own through tools. True agency, however, depends on deeper architectural elements: planning (and who controls it), explicit goals, self-direction (the ability to decide how to achieve a goal), and, at higher complexity, motivations that enable agents to generate their own goals.
The presentation frames agents as a natural evolution in software engineering: tools to describe and build complex AI systems responsibly and effectively. Ronald Ashri highlights how playbooks built around agents (including types, environment & protocol, and lifecycle) can be valuable.
Ultimately, this framework helps organizations design and build agents with clarity, aligning them to business needs while managing risks and governance.
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