Beyond the Book: Maarten Grootendorst and Jay Alammar on An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Concepts and Code for Building AI Agents with LLMs, Tools, and Memory
AI agents are rapidly changing what artificial intelligence can do. Instead of simply responding to prompts, these systems can reason, plan, use tools, and collaborate to accomplish increasingly complex tasks. As AI agents become a core part of modern software and business workflows, understanding how they work is becoming an essential skill for technical professionals and decision-makers alike.
Join Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst, authors of An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents, for an engaging discussion that demystifies the concepts behind agentic AI. Using the visual storytelling and practical explanations that have made their work widely respected, they'll explore how AI agents are built, how they reason, and where the technology is headed. Along the way, they'll separate hype from reality and provide a clear framework for understanding the capabilities, limitations, and real-world applications of agentic systems.
Whether you're a developer, data scientist, AI practitioner, product leader, educator, or simply looking to deepen your understanding of AI, you'll leave with a practical foundation for evaluating, building, and working with AI agents in an increasingly agentic world.
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
- Explore the core architecture of AI agents: tools, memory, and planning
- Understand reasoning LLMs, multimodal models, and multi-agent collaboration
- Understand the capabilities, limitations, and real-world applications of agentic systems
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a developer, data scientist, AI practitioner, product leader, or educator looking to deepen your understanding of AI.
- You want to go beyond the words on the page and ask your own questions.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions for Maarten Grootendorst and Jay Alammar
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Recommended follow-up:
- Read An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Friday, November 6, 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.
Jay Alammar
Jay Alammar is director and engineering fellow at Cohere, a provider of large language models as APIs, where he advises and educates enterprises and the developer community on practical use cases for language models. Through his popular AI/ML blog, he’s helped millions of researchers and engineers visually understand machine learning tools and concepts from the basic (ending up in the documentation of packages like NumPy and pandas) to the cutting-edge (Transformers, BERT, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion). Jay is also a cocreator of online machine learning and natural language processing courses.
Maarten Grootendorst
Maarten Grootendorst is a clinical data scientist. He holds master’s degrees in organizational psychology, clinical psychology, and data science, which he leverages to communicate complex machine learning concepts to a wide audience. With his popular blogs, he has reached millions of readers by explaining the fundamentals of artificial intelligence—often from a psychological point of view. He is the author and maintainer of several open source packages that rely on the strength of large language models, such as BERTopic, PolyFuzz, and KeyBERT. His packages are downloaded millions of times and used by data professionals and organizations worldwide.