Staging environment
Free Lesson

Forget Agents! Let's build a workflow instead

60 min
Mar 5, 2026 6:00 PM
Virtual (Zoom)

In this video

What you'll learn

Why fully autonomous agents often fail in production

Learn the common failure modes of autonomous agents, including drift, hidden errors, and evaluation blind spots

When to use agents vs structured workflows

Use a practical decision framework to determine the right level of autonomy, supervision, and control for your AI system

A lightweight evaluation harness you can implement now

Discover a simple evaluation and observability pattern you can add immediately to measure performance and catch failures

Why this topic matters

Agent this. Agent that. Aren't you tired of hearing about agents nonstop? Agents have become a little full of themselves. Agents go off in left field to decide how THEY want do your task. But a lot of our LLM-assisted work requires predictability and determinism. In this talk we'll convince you to think outside the box to broader ways of doing agentic work.

You'll learn from

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students (ex-Yale)

Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull

Retrieval Consultant + Snuggie Connoisseur

Previously at

Reddit
Shopify.com
Wikipedia
Virginia Tech
See all products from Doug