Building Better AI Agents: From Production Decisions to Agentic Search

Building Better AI Agents: From Production Decisions to Agentic Search

AI agents are moving fast, but building them well still means making the right decisions: which frameworks to trust, when to rely on SDKs, how to structure tools, what to observe in production, and how to make agents search and retrieve information effectively. In this Embrace:AI event, we’ll bring together two technical talks on what it actually takes to build useful, reliable AI agent systems beyond the hype.

Talk 1: Building AI Agents: A Year of Decisions That Actually Mattered

Speaker: Valiantsin Zavadski is co-founder of evy.so, a voice assistant for teams. He previously co-founded Narrative BI and Rubyroid Labs, has 20 years of experience in software, and has spent the last three years working deeply with production LLM systems.

In this talk, Valiantsin will share what he learned after a year building multiple production agents across different stacks. He’ll cover the choices that mattered, the ones that created unnecessary complexity, and when it makes sense to use frameworks versus dropping closer to the SDK.

Expect a practical developer retrospective with live comparisons, including LangChain vs CrewAI, MCP vs custom tools, and framework-based approaches vs raw SDKs.

Talk 2: What AI Agents Want from Search and How to Build It

Speaker: Philipp Pahl is co-founder and technical lead at peachstone.ai, an AI studio. He comes from a background in particle physics, machine learning, large data, and infrastructure projects.

Philipp will explore how search changes when the user is an AI agent reasoning through a task step by step.

He’ll explain recent developments in agentic search and retrieval, including reasoning-aware retrieval, reasoning-intensive retrieval, and late-interaction retrieval.

The talk will end with a live demo of a working agentic search system.

Supported by Quidgest A special thank you to Quidgest for supporting spaces where people can learn, share knowledge, and explore the future of AI together.

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