Foundations of Cloud AI Agents with Vertex AI

Organizations are rapidly adopting autonomous AI agents to automate complex workflows and deliver natural conversational experiences. This text-based course guides you from the foundational concepts of agentic workflows to the practical setup of cloud-based AI assistants. You will learn how to structure agent behaviors, integrate data sources, and manage conversation flows. What you'll learn: 1. Understand the core terminology, architectures, and capabilities of modern cloud AI agents. 2. Configure conversational agents and virtual assistants using Vertex AI Agent Builder. 3. Apply Gemini models to enhance natural language understanding and response generation. 4. Implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns to ground agent responses in real data. 5. Design structured playbooks, tools, and pathways for goal-oriented agent tasks. 6. Practice prompt engineering and system instruction design to control agent behavior. You will begin by learning key definitions and agent design principles before exploring step-by-step configuration workflows, tool integrations, and evaluation techniques. This course is designed for beginners, developers, and product creators looking to enter the world of AI agents, with no prior machine learning experience required. Start reading today to design and deploy your own intelligent cloud agents.