Why Most AI Agents Fail (and How Reliable Ones Are Built)

Hosted by Dr. Aki Wijesundara

Thu, Jan 8, 2026

10:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp & Certificate
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

What you’ll learn

Learn why most agents fail, structuring tool-using agents, memory patterns that scale, and testing/constraining behavior

Who it’s for

Engineers building agents | Developers exploring | LangChain agents Founders experimenting with autonomy

Outcome promise

You’ll understand how to design agents as systems, not prompts.

Designing Agents as Systems

This is why we spend real time on agent architecture in the AI Engineering Bootcamp.

Why this topic matters

Most AI agents look impressive — until they hallucinate, loop, or break. In this session, we’ll dissect what makes agents reliable: tool usage, memory design, structured outputs, and safe failure handling.

You'll learn from

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI researcher, educator, and founder with a PhD in Machine Learning and experience at Google's AI Accelerator, where he contributed to advancing real-world applications of machine learning and large language models. As Co-Founder of Snapdrum, he helps organizations design, build, and deploy applied AI systems that move beyond prototypes to production-scale impact.

Aki has taught over 5,000+ engineers, founders, and product leaders worldwide how to build production-ready AI systems using LangChain, RAG pipelines, and MLOps frameworks.

He serves as AI Advisor to the United Nations, contributing expertise on responsible AI implementation and policy.

His work bridges cutting-edge research and practical implementation across text, voice, and multimodal AI.

Alongside Snapdrum, Aki serves as CTO of Krybe, an AI voice automation startup, and CTO of Tilli, an edtech company redefining how learners engage with AI-powered education.

Previous students from

Google
Meta
OpenAI
Amazon Web Services
NVIDIA

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