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⇱ Building and Optimizing AI Agent Workflows | Coursera


Building and Optimizing AI Agent Workflows

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Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

2 weeks to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

2 weeks to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

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.

Details to know

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Recently updated!

March 2026

Assessments

18 assignments¹

AI Graded see disclaimer
Taught in English

Build your Design and Product expertise

This course is part of the Master Agentic AI: Core Principles & Real-World PC Professional Certificate
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Professional Certificate.
  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate from Coursera

There are 6 modules in this course

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.

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

6 videosTotal 40 minutes
  • Why Ethical AI Rewards Matter?6 minutes
  • What Is a Reward Function?6 minutes
  • How to Code a Basic Reward Function?8 minutes
  • The Real-World Cost of Algorithmic Bias6 minutes
  • What are Ethical Frameworks & GDPR?8 minutes
  • How to Conduct a Bias Audit?6 minutes
2 readingsTotal 12 minutes
  • A Successful Chatbot Reward Strategy7 minutes
  • Deep Dive into the AI Bias Lawsuit5 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 65 minutes
  • AI Agent Policy Synthesis and Ethical Justification30 minutes
  • Hands-On Learning: Scenario Challenge: The Overly-Efficient Chatbot20 minutes
  • Hands-On Learning: Formative Quiz: Bias and GDPR Compliance15 minutes
1 ungraded labTotal 40 minutes
  • Reward Scheme Optimization Lab40 minutes

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

4 videosTotal 24 minutes
  • When Good Agents Go Bad?7 minutes
  • How-To: Run a Data-Driven Agent Comparison?5 minutes
  • The Monolith vs. The Micro-Agent6 minutes
  • How-To: Define a Clear API Contract in Python?6 minutes
3 readingsTotal 15 minutes
  • ReAct vs. Reflexion: A Tale of Two Architectures5 minutes
  • The Anatomy of a Reusable Agent5 minutes
  • AI Agents in the Wild: Case Studies5 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 50 minutes
  • Agent Architecture & Design Report30 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Architecture Scenarios10 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Component Roles10 minutes
2 ungraded labsTotal 120 minutes
  • A/B Testing ReAct vs. Reflexion60 minutes
  • Architecting Modular Agent Components60 minutes

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

4 videosTotal 23 minutes
  • A* vs. Beam Search: Choosing the Right Tool7 minutes
  • How to Implement Beam Search in Python?6 minutes
  • A Visual Guide to Big-O Notation5 minutes
  • How to Profile Code and Find a Bottleneck?6 minutes
4 readingsTotal 21 minutes
  • Understanding Informed Search Algorithms5 minutes
  • Choosing the Right Algorithm: A Scenario-Based Guide 5 minutes
  • Case Study: The Real-World Cost of Inefficiency5 minutes
  • Anatomy of an Optimization Proposal6 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 50 minutes
  • Submit Your Optimization Project30 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Search Algorithm Concepts10 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Complexity Concepts10 minutes
2 ungraded labsTotal 75 minutes
  • Optimizing a Planner with Beam Search 60 minutes
  • From Quadratic to Indexed: Kill the O(n²) Bottleneck15 minutes

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

5 videosTotal 30 minutes
  • Designing an Effective Prompt Template5 minutes
  • Evaluating Model Output with a Rubric6 minutes
  • The Best of Both Worlds7 minutes
  • Architecting a Sequential Hybrid Workflow7 minutes
  • Turning a Script into a Python Module6 minutes
4 readingsTotal 24 minutes
  • What is a Generative Search Workflow?6 minutes
  • How-To: Building an Evaluation Framework5 minutes
  • What is a Hybrid Algorithmic Workflow?5 minutes
  • How-To: Modularizing Your Workflow for CI8 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 65 minutes
  • Implement a Complete Hybrid Search Pipeline30 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Prompt and Evaluation Scenarios5 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Hybrid Search Pipeline30 minutes
2 ungraded labsTotal 45 minutes
  • Build and Evaluate a Generative Search20 minutes
  • Build a Modular Hybrid Search Workflow25 minutes

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

7 videosTotal 47 minutes
  • From Chaos to Clarity: The Need for Feature Engineering5 minutes
  • Core Techniques for Processing Text Data7 minutes
  • Building a Preprocessing Pipeline in Python7 minutes
  • When Good Models Make Bad Decisions6 minutes
  • Understanding Model Decisions with SHAP7 minutes
  • How to Run SHAP on Misclassified Data8 minutes
  • Presenting Your Findings to Stakeholders7 minutes
3 readingsTotal 30 minutes
  • The Foundation of Feature Engineering10 minutes
  • An Introduction to Interpretable Machine Learning10 minutes
  • Structuring Your Interpretability Report10 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 60 minutes
  • AI Model Decision Toolkit30 minutes
  • Transforming Raw Conversation Logs25 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Feature Engineering Concepts5 minutes
1 ungraded labTotal 60 minutes
  • Detecting Spurious Correlations with SHAP60 minutes

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

3 videosTotal 16 minutes
  • Comparing Model Inference6 minutes
  • Why Standardize? The Reproducibility Crisis5 minutes
  • Building a Scikit-learn Pipeline5 minutes
2 readingsTotal 15 minutes
  • Understanding the Size-Performance Trade-Off8 minutes
  • The Scikit-learn Pipeline Object7 minutes
3 assignmentsTotal 42 minutes
  • Project: Model Analysis and Pipeline Implementation30 minutes
  • Model Trade-Offs6 minutes
  • Knowledge Check: Pipeline Construction6 minutes
2 ungraded labsTotal 35 minutes
  • Analyze Model Performance Metrics20 minutes
  • Construct a Full ML Pipeline15 minutes

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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.

To access the course materials, assignments and to earn a Certificate, you will need to purchase the Certificate experience when you enroll in a course. You can try a Free Trial instead, or apply for Financial Aid. The course may offer 'Full Course, No Certificate' instead. This option lets you see all course materials, submit required assessments, and get a final grade. This also means that you will not be able to purchase a Certificate experience.

When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Certificate, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile.

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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.