This book is a comprehensive, hands-on guide designed for engineers, developers, and AI enthusiasts eager to understand and build intelligent agents capable of autonomous decision-making.

The book starts with concepts of foundation of agentic AI and explores the role of attention mechanisms and transformer architectures, key innovations that enable agents to reason contextually and perform complex tasks. Next, you will learn Large Language Models (LLMs) and Specialised Language Models (SLMs), learning how to harness them through prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and hands-on API integrations using Hugging Face and OpenAI.

From theory to practice, readers will learn to build AI agents from scratch using .NET and Python, evolving from single-agent architectures to collaborative multi-agent systems. The book covers Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication, enterprise guardrails, and production-ready orchestration. Readers will master agent evaluation principles, including offline benchmarking, online production evaluations, automated quality and safety assessments, performance metrics, and continuous monitoring techniques to build trustworthy, scalable, enterprise-grade AI systems.

By the end, the reader will understand the skills to not only create functional AI agents but to understand their potential, limitations, and ethical considerations. Whether you're exploring agent design or deploying at scale, this book is your roadmap to the future of AI autonomy.

What you will learn:

● Understand the core concepts, history, and distinctions of Agentic AI compared to generative and autonomous systems.

● How to build intelligent agents using LLMs, prompt engineering, and tools like LangChain and Hugging Face.

● How to build single- and multi-agent systems with memory, tool use, communication, and dynamic decision-making.

● Master AI evaluation with offline and online testing, safety and quality assessments, performance metrics, observability, and monitoring.

● Implement MCP, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication, enterprise guardrails, and secure tool orchestration to build production-ready AI agents.

Who this book is for:

This book is for AI/ML engineers wanting to move into autonomous systems, data scientists exploring advanced LLM applications and users who want to start building complex agents.

Abhishek Raj Permani is an AI practitioner, technology leader, author, and educator specialising in Generative AI, Computer Vision, and Agentic Systems. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from IIT and has further strengthened his business and leadership perspective through his association with IIM. During his career, Abhishek has worked with organisations including Samsung Research, Jaguar Land Rover, and Sun King, contributing to the development and deployment of practical AI solutions at scale.Beyond his industry work, he has contributed to international research, spoken at leading academic institutions and technology forums, and mentored learners and professionals in applying AI meaningfully. Through his contributions to the tech community he has also been featured at Times Square US and with this book, Abhishek brings together his industry experience, research knowledge, and passion for teaching to make agentic AI practical, accessible, and relevant for the next generation of builders.

Jithin Jude Paul is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, building enterprise-scale agentic AI experiences and intelligent business solutions. . He specializes in designing and building enterprise-scale agentic AI experiences and intelligent business applications. Throughout his career, he has architected and built production-grade AI agents and multi-agent systems, bringing practical experience from real-world AI engineering into this book. Passionate about bridging AI research and software engineering, he helps developers and architects build secure, scalable, and production-ready AI applications through practical implementations in both .NET and Python. He is also the author of Distributed Serverless Architectures on AWS and is an active speaker at National and international tech conferences.