Beyond chatbots: agents, orchestration, and AI-first development.
2024 was the year of chatbots. 2026 is the year of autonomous agents. In this hands-on session, Elon students went past prompting a chatbot and into the tools professional builders actually use to ship software with AI, then built their own working AI agent.
Six practical areas, with the real tools students can start using now.
AI that understands your whole project, not just the file you are editing. It maps your codebase and writes and debugs across multiple files with you.
AI that lives in your command line: reading files, writing scripts, running commands, and managing git, tests, and deployments.
Idea to app. Describe what you want and generate a working UI or prototype in minutes, no code required to start.
Drag-and-drop pipelines that connect AI to Slack, GitHub, APIs, and databases, mixing AI reasoning with reliable, repeatable logic.
Instead of one AI doing everything, multiple specialized agents collaborate, each handling a task like researching, coding, reviewing, or deploying.
Every student named an agent, wrote its persona in plain English, gave it tools, then chatted, tested, iterated, and published it to the gallery.
Students saw working FaithlineAI projects, not just slides.
Bringing hungry students to free food events on campus.
Machine-learning vision analysis for grooming recommendations.
A customized, AI-powered fan experience.
Experience with agentic tools and AI orchestration is in extremely high demand. The point is not just to use AI, it is to build with it. Students left with real skills for their resumes and a working agent they made themselves.