Beyond the Book: Babak Hodjat and Antoine Blondeau on the Agentic Enterprise
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
A leader’s guide to orchestrating, governing, and scaling AI agent systems
Agentic AI is quickly moving from experimentation to enterprise adoption, but turning its promise into production requires more than the latest models. Organizations must navigate questions around governance, interoperability, security, vendor lock-in, and long-term scalability, while identifying where agentic AI can deliver real business value.
Join Babak Hodjat of Cognizant and Antoine Blondeau of Alpha Capital for a discussion of the ideas behind their new book, The Agentic Enterprise, and a practical look at what it takes to successfully adopt and scale agentic AI in the enterprise. Drawing on their experience building AI systems and advising technology leaders, they’ll share frameworks for evaluating organizational readiness, making smart architectural decisions, managing risk, and preparing for the future of multi-agent systems.
Whether you’re a CxO, VP, director, architect, or engineering leader responsible for shaping your organization’s AI strategy, you’ll leave with practical guidance you can apply immediately.
Join us each month for Beyond the Book, a live series hosted by Vicki Reyzelman, featuring in-depth conversations with the authors shaping technology today. From AI and data science to software architecture, cybersecurity, leadership, and beyond, each episode explores the ideas behind the latest books and the real-world challenges that inspired them. Stay ahead of industry shifts and get a glimpse into the thinking driving today’s most influential technology books with a front-row seat to these thoughtful discussions.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand what agentic AI is and when it creates real business value
- Determine whether your organization is ready for agentic AI, and identify use cases
- Make smart build-versus-buy decisions, and avoid lock-in
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a CxO, VP, director, or engineering leader tasked with evaluating, implementing, and scaling AI systems.
- You want to go beyond the words on the page and ask your own questions.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions for Babak Hodjat and Antoine Blondeau
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Recommended follow-up:
- Read The Agentic Enterprise (book)
- Watch From Individual Agents to Multi-Agent Enterprise Ecosystems (event video)
- Watch CTO Hour with Peter Bell: Engineering Metrics for Agentic Development Teams (event video)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Friday, September 11, 2026, at 7:00am PT / 10:00am ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (30 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Vicki Reyzelman
Vicki Reyzelman is a senior solutions engineer at Akamai, where she helps organizations around the globe protect and secure their online applications. She’s worked extensively in the fields of cloud integration, security, API ecosystems, and software development and has written dozens of blog posts and articles on technology solutions to business problems and on technology trends for e_Week_ magazine. She’s also a patent holder for a search assistant technology at Yahoo! Vicki holds an AI certificate from MIT, an MBA from Georgia State University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kennesaw State University.
Babak Hodjat
Babak Hodjat is the chief AI officer at Cognizant, where he leads the Cognizant AI Lab (CAIL), a team of developers and researchers bringing advanced AI solutions to businesses. Babak is a serial entrepreneur, having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist. He cofounded and served as CEO of Sentient, responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed artificial intelligence system. He also cofounded the world’s first AI-driven hedge fund, Sentient Investment Management, and was cofounder, CTO, and board member of Dejima Inc. Babak is the primary inventor of Dejima’s patented, agent-oriented technology applied to intelligent interfaces for mobile and enterprise computing, the technology behind the original Apple Siri. He has 41 US AI patents to his name.
Antoine Blondeau
Antoine Blondeau is a technology entrepreneur and investor, and the cofounder and managing partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), a global venture capital firm investing in deep artificial intelligence technology companies worldwide. Over the past 28 years Antoine has dedicated himself to the development of AI. He was the CEO of Dejima, the company that powered DARPA’s foundational CALO project that evolved into Apple’s Siri. Antoine was also president and COO of Nasdaq-listed Zi Corporation, whose predictive text input software was embedded in hundreds of millions of devices. He was also the cofounder and CEO of Sentient Technologies, a deep AI technology startup that pioneered massively scaled AI. Antoine is also board chair of crypto.com, one of the world’s largest blockchain and cryptocurrency full-service platforms.