Most AI events talk about what's coming. This one's about what's already working.
AI That Works is a monthly meetup for anyone building with AI in Austin: developers, founders, operators, GTM teams, and the AI-curious.
Every session: live demos from people shipping real things, a hands-on build, and honest conversation about what's actually producing results.
Whether you're deep in code or mostly prompting, if you're putting AI to work on something real, you belong here.
This month
We'll go beyond single-purpose scrapers and learn how to build better agent tools by combining multiple Apify Actors into one Actor with custom logic. The kind of tool you'd actually want to hand to an agent: scoped, opinionated, and built around a real task instead of a raw API.
How the evening works
We'll start with a quick look at why most "agent tools" underperform - too generic, too chatty, too much for the model to reason about - and what makes a good one.
Then we'll build one together. We'll take a real workflow (think: research a company, enrich the data, filter the results) and wrap multiple existing Actors inside a single new Actor, with custom logic stitching them together. One clean input, one useful output, one tool your agent actually knows how to use.
Finally, we'll wire that Actor up as an MCP tool and watch an agent call it end-to-end.
You'll leave with a working composite Actor in your Apify account and a repeatable pattern for turning messy multi-step workflows into clean, agent-ready tools.
Bring your laptop.
Requirements
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Laptop (macOS, Windows, or Linux)
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Apify account (free or higher) with enough platform usage left in the month to run workflows live
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Node.js installed
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Your preferred code editor (Cursor, VS Code, etc.)
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Some comfort with the terminal and basic JavaScript/TypeScript - you don't need to be an expert, but you'll be editing code during the build
Don't have all of this? No worries - you can follow along with someone at the event who does. The concepts apply regardless of your stack.
Apify is the platform behind thousands of ready-to-use tools that give AI agents and apps access to web data, automation, and real world information. But this meetup isn't a product pitch.
It's a community. See what people are building, learn something new, and meet the people doing the work.
👾 Join the conversation on Discord 🔗
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