This long course equips you with practical knowledge and hands-on skills required to design, architect, and optimize autonomous AI agents that solve multi-step tasks reliably, efficiently, and responsibly. You will study reward-design and reinforcement-learning foundations to translate business objectives into robust reward signals, while learning to evaluate ethical, legal, and societal impacts of agent decision policies. The course covers competing reasoning-loop architectures (e.g., ReAct and Reflexion), modular agent component design with clear APIs, and search and planning strategies (A*, beam search, and heuristic augmentation). You will also practice feature engineering and model-interpretability methods to expose spurious correlations and produce explainable agent behaviors. Finally, the course guides you to make strategic modeling choices—such as fine-tuning large models versus training smaller task-specific models—and to package reproducible, reusable ML pipelines for agent subsystems. Throughout the course, practical labs and engineering-focused examples emphasize production-readiness, modularity, and trustworthiness.

Building and Optimizing AI Agent Workflows
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Building and Optimizing AI Agent Workflows
This course is part of Master Agentic AI: Core Principles & Real-World PC Professional Certificate

Instructor: Professionals from the Industry
Included with
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Design ethical RL reward functions that align agent behavior and analyze AI's legal and societal implications.
Build modular, scalable agent systems with clear APIs using advanced reasoning-loop architectures like ReAct.
Apply search algorithms & Big-O analysis to optimize pipelines, balancing performance, cost, and success rates.
Build reusable ML pipelines to transform data and apply interpretability techniques to detect model bias.
Skills you'll gain
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March 2026
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There are 6 modules in this course
This module is for professionals and data scientists aiming to build responsible AI. As AI reshapes business, balancing performance with ethics is vital. This course provides a deep dive into reinforcement learning, teaching you to craft reward functions that align with corporate goals and global regulations like GDPR. Through hands-on labs and real-world case studies, you’ll learn to identify biases and implement fair governance. By bridging theory and practice, the program empowers you to lead initiatives that prioritize accountability, ensuring your AI systems deliver immense value without compromising integrity or public trust.
What's included
6 videos2 readings3 assignments1 ungraded lab
This module is for engineers transitioning from single-purpose bots to scalable, modular architectures. You’ll master advanced system design to build maintainable AI that evolves with business needs. The curriculum focuses on evaluating reasoning loops like ReAct and Reflexion through data-driven A/B testing. Through hands-on labs, you will apply software engineering best practices to develop reusable components—Planner, Memory, and Executor—using typed API contracts. By the end, you’ll be equipped to design and document a complete Python package of agent components, ready for seamless integration into high-value production environments.
What's included
4 videos3 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
This module is focused on building fast, scalable, and responsive systems. Recognizing that speed is as vital as intelligence, this program equips engineers to diagnose and resolve critical performance bottlenecks. You will master optimization techniques, replacing brute-force methods with sophisticated algorithms like beam search. Through hands-on labs, you’ll apply Big-O notation to analyze multi-tool reasoning pipelines and use profilers to pinpoint slowdowns. By learning to implement optimizations—such as indexing to reduce complexity from O(n^2) to O(log n)—you’ll gain the technical expertise to justify engineering decisions through professional proposals.
What's included
4 videos4 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
This module is for engineers and data scientists aiming to build intelligent, factually reliable search systems. While generative AI excels at reasoning, it often hallucinates; traditional search is accurate but lacks context. This program teaches you to architect hybrid workflows that ground LLMs with verifiable data. You will move beyond basic prompting to design and optimize systems for performance and cost. Through hands-on labs, you’ll master parameter tuning and modularizing code for production-ready CI/CD pipelines. By the end, you’ll be equipped to deploy trustworthy, context-aware AI applications that deliver reliable results at scale.
What's included
5 videos4 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
This module is aimed for ML professionals who prioritize trust and accountability. In modern AI, high accuracy is insufficient; you must justify model outputs and mitigate harmful biases. This program teaches you to combine advanced feature engineering with model interpretability for ethical deployment. Through hands-on training, you will transform unstructured chat logs into model-ready tensors using Python, scikit-learn, TF-IDF, and embedding aggregation. You’ll then deconstruct "black box" models using SHAP to diagnose misclassifications and flag spurious correlations. By the end, you’ll develop an AI Model Decision Toolkit, equipping you to deliver stakeholder-ready reports that ensure transparent, reliable production AI.
What's included
7 videos3 readings3 assignments1 ungraded lab
This is a module for engineers and data scientists focusing on scalable, maintainable workflows. Beyond simple model selection, this program teaches you to build standardized, reusable pipelines that accelerate development and ensure consistency. You will strategically evaluate trade-offs between large pre-trained models and efficient, custom alternatives, balancing performance with inference speed and cost. Through hands-on labs, you’ll master modular construction using Scikit-learn, emphasizing best practices for model management and versioning. By the end, you will transition from ad-hoc development to a systematic, pipeline-driven approach, essential for deploying robust, production-ready AI solutions.
What's included
3 videos2 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
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Frequently asked questions
This course is advanced and assumes foundational ML knowledge and programming ability. Learners without that background should first consider introductory ML or Python courses to gain the most from the hands-on engineering labs.
The course includes practical labs focused on reward design, modular agent engineering, hybrid search workflows, feature engineering from logs, and pipeline templating. Labs emphasize reproducibility and producing engineering artifacts suitable for a technical portfolio.
The curriculum explains concepts and includes engineering-focused examples. Specific tooling and lab environments (e.g., experiment tracking, pipeline libraries, and model-serving frameworks) were not exhaustively listed in the document; please confirm preferred tools and versions so instructors can align labs and exercises.
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¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.

