Join Equal Experts for a hands-on afternoon with Lewis Crawford (Chief AI Officer - Equal Experts) for a session on designing agentic systems built from stable, specialised components.

Most teams are building agents the way they first learned to: large, framework-locked, and hard to govern once they hit production. This session takes the opposite approach. Lewis Crawford, who teaches Agent-Oriented Architecture (AOA) through O'Reilly, walks through how to decompose real workflows into agentic units: independently deployable capabilities with explicit contracts, metadata, and lifecycles that can be composed, discovered, evaluated, and replaced as models and tooling keep changing.

It's a working session, not a talk. You'll bring a laptop, inspect and modify a running reference implementation of a multi-agent system, follow the trace, and make controlled changes to the behavior behind a stable capability, then judge the architecture on its technical merits.

What you'll work through

• The agentic inversion: why agent sprawl, hidden coupling, and framework lock-in make today's approaches hard to scale and govern.
• Anatomy of an agentic unit: capability cards, A2A boundaries, MCP-backed tool access, registry metadata, observability, and lifecycle state.
• AOA in the real world: how the same responsibilities recur across SOA, microservices, orchestration tools, and vendor platforms, and why frameworks can live inside units without defining the architecture.
• Putting it together: from a single pipeline to a small knowledge-management system using AOA patterns: ingest, promote, graph, ask, trace.

Who it's for?

Senior engineers, architects, technical leads, and engineering managers who are already experimenting with agents in earnest and want a durable architectural foundation rather than another framework. Intermediate level, a working knowledge of software architecture is assumed.

Workshop details

Format: Hands-on workshop, inspect and modify a live multi-agent reference implementation
Bring: A laptop with Docker Desktop (or equivalent) installed
Instructor: Lewis Crawford, O'Reilly instructor in Agent-Oriented Architecture

Course outline for context.