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Davidson College

Building AI Agents for Beginners

Davidson College via edX

Overview

MIT Sloan: Drive Business Value with AI
6-week cohort with live MIT Faculty sessions. Learn to scale AI beyond the pilot stage.
Build Your AI Strategy

Artificial intelligence has moved far beyond the chatbot. Today's frontier AI systems browse the web, write and organize files, manage spreadsheets, coordinate projects, and execute multi-step workflows with minimal supervision. These are AI agents — and knowing how to build and direct them is quickly becoming one of the most in-demand skills across every profession.

This 4-week course gives working professionals a practical, no-code path to using AI agents effectively. You'll progress from prompting today's most powerful AI models like a power user, to building persistent automated workflows, to connecting AI to third-party tools and apps, to commanding fully autonomous agent software on your own computer. Through hands-on demonstrations and real-world professional scenarios, you'll develop both the technical fluency and the experimental mindset needed to stay ahead as agentic AI continues to evolve.

Syllabus

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Apply the flipped interaction pattern and other advanced prompting techniques to get richer, more useful outputs from AI

  • Design and deploy agentic workflows that automate multi-step tasks across multiple sessions

  • Configure Projects with custom instructions, uploaded files, and persistent memory to build reusable AI assistants

  • Connect AI to third-party platforms, including Notion, Excalidraw, and others, via local and remote Connectors

  • Build and customize Skills and Plugins to extend and share AI capabilities across teams

  • Use Claude Cowork to autonomously manage files, conduct research, produce documents, and execute complex workflows on your computer

  • Evaluate new AI models and features as they are released, and adapt your practice accordingly

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