Agentic AI in Action : From RAG to Agents and Bringing Archives Back to Life

Tonight PyData Amsterdam had for the very first time some The Hague flavor; Odido Nederland hosted us at their HQ office with an edition that was all about Agentic AI in Action ⚡️

Ian (Zhengru) Shen kicked off the meetup and unveiled in his talk what it truly takes to evolve from a RAG based chatbot to one with an powerful and flexible Agentic AI architecture. The core was around how smart framework choices and proven design patterns lay the foundation for intelligent agents.

Important things to consider:
▪️Use simple design principles; for example each agent consistently follows the reasoning and act (ReAct) pattern
▪️Agentic systems need a complete data ecosystem with write permissions, authorization and audit trails
▪️From the beginning put evaluation first; you can’t improve what you don’t measure - offline evaluation is a pivotal form in which realistic cases can be validated in CI/CD pipelines
▪️Langfuse is an useful open source framework for LLM evaluations and monitoring
▪️Building Agentic systems requires a strong mindset shift to engineering

After a short break Lucas Puddifoot & Niket Saurabh took us into a groundbreaking project they did with Gemeente Amsterdam - in which 750 years of Amsterdam’s stories became a living, conversational experience. Powered by Agentic AI, 60 kilometers of handwritten archives were transformed in something you can search, explore and talk to.

A few takeaways of how to make it work?
▪️Semantic Kernel was used to create a team of specialized agents for specific tasks
▪️A specific Search Agent was used to handle old Dutch
▪️Not use sequential agents or handoff agents - especially the last one seemed to be not a real team player
▪️Chainlit was used as open source framework for the frontend

A big thanks to our hosts Odido Nederland, Adi Kalkan, Robin Disma, the speakers Ian (Zhengru) Shen, Lucas Puddifoot & Niket Saurabh, organizers Alexander O. & Atul Chhotray and of course to all of you that joined us on this edition! ❤️‍🔥

Keep an eye out on meetup and LinkedIn for our next meetup; hope to see you all there! 🙌