Whether you're tasked with making agent prototypes production-ready or building mission-critical automation from the ground up, this book guides you through every layer of the stack, without being framework-dependent. It covers architectures, tool integration, performance optimization, safety strategies, and advanced evaluation, with a relentless focus on reliability and long-term value.
Nicole Koenigstein is an AI researcher and practitioner in agentic systems, working across research, consulting, teaching, and direct system implementation to build reliable, production-ready AI systems. Her work focuses on multi-agent architectures, evaluation, safety, and long-term system behavior. She served as an external evaluator for a European Commission AI Grand Challenge and has advised IOSCO on generative AI in regulated environments. She also serves on advisory boards for leading AI and quantitative finance conferences. Nicole regularly delivers invited talks and technical workshops across academia, industry, and international events. She is the author of Math for Machine Learning and Transformers in Action with Manning Publications. Her forthcoming books, Transformers: The Definitive Guide--Applications Beyond NLP and AI Agents: The Definitive Guide, will be published by O'Reilly Media.