Understanding, Creating and Deploying Agents (3-part series - Feb 4, 11, & 18)

Agents are rapidly becoming the key way that AI delivers systematic, scalable benefits beyond one-off experiments. In this course you'll gain hands-on experience designing, creating and deploying agents for everyday tasks, from workflow automation to core research and insight challenges.

The Course Three 2-hour interactive online lessons, delivered by Ray Poynter. Each lesson will be accompanied by optional hands-on tasks and practical exercises to help you apply what you've learned. You will receive access to the recordings, slides, and supplementary materials after each lesson.

Lesson Outlines Lesson 1: Foundations of Agents An introduction to agents and their transformative potential for research workflows. You'll see real-world examples of agents in action across different research scenarios and learn the fundamentals of creating instruction-based assistant agents in Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT. We'll work through a decision framework to help you identify which tasks and processes in your workflow would benefit most from agent deployment. By the end of this lesson, you'll have created your first simple agents and received example projects to explore and adapt for your own needs.

Lesson 2: Enhancing and Managing Agents Building on the foundations from Lesson 1, you'll learn how to transform basic agents into more powerful tools by adding custom knowledge bases, external connections, and scheduling capabilities. We'll cover essential practices for testing, iterating and maintaining your agents to ensure reliability and accuracy. The lesson will also introduce workflow automation platforms like Zapier and N8N, showing how these tools can connect your agents to existing systems and create seamless automated processes that handle repetitive research tasks.

Lesson 3: Advanced Capabilities and Deployment The final lesson explores advanced agent features including code interpretation, API integrations, and multi-agent orchestration. You'll learn how to implement Human-in-the-Loop practices to maintain quality control and address ethical considerations in agent deployment. We'll examine third-party agent creation platforms that can help you scale solutions across your team and organization. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand how to build enterprise-ready agent systems that deliver consistent value while maintaining appropriate oversight and governance.

What You Will Learn

• What agents are, why they're transforming research workflows, and where to deploy them for maximum impact

• How to audit your current workflow and identify high-value opportunities for agent implementation

• How to create and customize agents in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot – plus an overview of alternative platforms

• How to evaluate, test and maintain your agents to ensure they deliver reliable, high-quality outputs

• How to use workflow automation tools like N8N to create sophisticated multi-step solutions

• How to leverage third-party tools to scale agent capabilities across your team

Who Is the Course For? This course is for market researchers, insight professionals and team leaders who want to move beyond AI experimentation and start leveraging agents to gain systematic, scalable benefits. The course does NOT require coding skills or technical experience, but does assume reasonable familiarity with at least one of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. To fully benefit from the course and complete the practical exercises, you should ideally have paid access to at least one of these platforms.