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GenAI Prompt to Product Showcase: Agent Skills

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

AI Agent Skills for powering tasks in agentic systems

Agent Skills have introduced a crucial modular and reusable element for inserting domain knowledge for task execution into your agentic system. Based on a now open and widely used standard, Skills provide AI agents with instructions, constraints, and a framework for how agents think, plan, and complete a specific workflow. Agents that leverage Skills can extend the system’s competence, control bloat in your context, ensure consistency for task execution, and allow teams to review and audit what’s going into your system. Join host Lucas Soares to learn more about how Agent Skills are created and deployed into agentic systems, and see presentations of specific Skills that can assist you with productivity, data analysis, building AI systems, and more.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Learn what Agent Skills are and how to build them for your agentic system
  • Discover the best practices for leveraging Agent Skills in your agent’s context

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re an AI, ML, or prompt engineer or data scientist who wants to learn more about prompt and context engineering for building generative AI applications.
  • You’re a domain expert who wants to see how Agent Skills can insert specific expertise into your AI system.
  • You’re a curious observer who wants to see hands-on demonstrations about what goes into making specialized agent systems.

Prerequisites

  • Come with your questions for host Lucas Soares
  • Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Tuesday, July 28, 2026, 9:00am–12:00pm PT | 12:00pm–3:00pm ET

Part I (35 minutes) 9:00am–9:35am PT

  • Presentation: Introduction to host and experts; overview of Agent Skills—how they came about and the benefits and challenges of leveraging them in agentic systems
  • Q&A

Break (5 minutes) 9:35am–9:40am PT

Part II (100 minutes) 9:40am–11:20am PT

  • Presentations: Five 20-minute presentations with feedback, analysis, and Q&A
    • Skill 1: FastAPI GenAI Service Builder and Production Readiness Checker—Alirezah Parandeh
    • Skill 2: PM Workflow Agent Skill—Pearl Pullan
    • Skill 3: Skill to be confirmed—Shruti Mantri
    • Skill 4: Automated Dashboarding and Pitch Decks—Prahitha Movva
    • Skill 5: Agent-Agnostic Skills That Travel With Your Notes—Louis-Francois Bouchard
  • Poll: What types of Agent Skills do you think would be necessary for your agentic system?

Break (5 minutes) 11:20am–11:25am PT

Part III (35 minutes) 11:25am–12:00pm PT

  • Presentation: Review the Agents Skills and patterns learned from the expert presentations
  • Q&A

Your Hosts and Guests

  • Lucas Soares

    Lucas Soares is a machine learning engineer who has worked at K1 Digital and Biometrid, where he developed computer vision and NLP models for applications such as document verification, OCR-based applications, and recommender systems. Lucas has also developed various ML models, including neural networks, Siamese networks, convolutional neural networks, LSTMs, and genetic algorithms.

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  • Alireza Parandeh

    Alireza Parandeh is a Chartered Engineer and AI software engineer who specializes in building reliable and secure AI agents and services. He’s the author of Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI (O’Reilly, 2025) and founder of Build Your AI Ltd, an AI consultancy focused on safe AI for heavy industries including rail, manufacturing, aerospace, construction, and oil and gas. He holds Microsoft Azure Developer and Google Professional Data Engineer certifications.

  • Louis-Francois Bouchard

    Louis-François Bouchard is the cofounder of Towards AI, where he builds and teaches a practical toolkit for shipping reliable LLM products. He coauthored Building LLMs for Production, a hands-on guide to prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation, and evaluation. Through Towards AI Academy, he has launched multiple in-depth courses designed to turn developers into AI professionals who can transform prototypes into scalable, customer-ready systems. He also runs the What’s AI YouTube channel and newsletter, translating new research and best practices into clear engineering playbooks for 70K+ subscribers and tens of thousands of readers. Today, he partners with founders and organizations on AI strategy, training design, and production workflows that raise accuracy, reduce risk, and make generative AI useful for paying customers.

  • Prahitha Movva

    Prahitha Movva is an AI researcher and engineer focused on how language models are evaluated and deployed in practice. She has published work at NeurIPS, COLM, and ACL workshops, with research centered on diagnosing gaps between benchmark performance and real capability. Her applied work spans high-stakes deployment contexts including a DSSG fellowship with UNICEF and ML projects at Spotify and Santander Bank. She leads the ML Industry Program at Cohere Labs and runs the Community Champion sessions for the Applied AI Research track at LevelUp Labs. She’s all about making sure research ideas actually make sense for engineering teams.

  • Pearl Pullan

    Pearl Pullan is a product manager at Samsung Research America (SRA), where she works on generative AI initiatives focused on improving voice assistant experiences. With a background in software engineering and product management, she drives cross-functional innovation across AI, user experience, and data-driven product development.

Skill covered

AI Agents