Build Practical Agents with Hermes (w/ The AI Collective)

Build your own useful AI agent in one afternoon. Agents are most powerful when they are pointed at a real job you actually have. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn what AI agents are good for, identify your own use case, build a working agent with Hermes on your laptop, connect it to the places where you already do your work, and set it up to talk to you and your team where you already work (Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Signal, etc.) Who is this workshop for? You've never built an agent and want to learn You've got ideas about tasks you want to automate with agents but don't know where to start and want someone to help You've built dozens of agents and want to learn Hermes Anyone in between Business, builders, hobbyists, and curious beginners are welcome. The Agenda Part 1) Art of the Possible We’ll start with the mental model: What's an agent? Real-world use cases across work, life, ops, and research Why Hermes Agent by Nous Research? Part 2) Use case Brainstorm: Find a real problem Agents are useful when they take over information work you already do by hand. Self improving regular briefings: read newsletters, websites, events, releases, or updates and summarize only what matters Alert triage and resolution: automatically evaluate inbound issues, even automate resolution or escalation Research tracking: watch a topic, grant, policy, market, company, competitor, or project and report meaningful changes Operations health: inspect systems, dashboards, services, or recurring checks and report only what needs attention Personal admin: help track, manage, and schedule your events, appointments, renewals, reminders, purchases, travel, or recurring chores Virtual employee: train your agent to manage specific knowledge work tasks with browser and computer use automation And more! Part 3) Setup Your Agent We’ll get Hermes running and configured: Install Hermes Connect a model/provider Configure tools, skills, MCP/connectors, and local context Chat where you already work: Discord, Telegram, Slack, Teams, email, or another target Part 4) Make Your Agent Useful for You This is the main build block. You’ll pick a use case, bootstrap a Hermes skill, run it, inspect the result, and improve it through feedback. We’ll cover: Building your first agent around your chosen use case Teaching the agent to get sharper with each iteration Scheduling and delivery so the agent can run and message you where you already work What You'll Leave With Your own AI agent installed and working Connected to your messaging platform of choice One agent skill bootstrapped for something you actually care about A practical pattern you can reuse to build more agents later What To Bring Laptop and charger Ideas for what to build (We’ll help you find a practical use case during the workshop.) Optional Pre-work Get more out of the workshop by installing and configuring Hermes before you come. This will prevent you from losing time on snags. https://hermes.arcadian.cloud/pre-work Community events have limited space and we cannot always accept everyone we would like to. If you are not accepted to this event, please keep applying! We appreciate your application tremendously and we are looking forward to seeing you at a future event very soon! The AI Collective is a global non-profit building the human layer for the AI era. We unite 200,000+ leaders, builders, and stakeholders across 100+ forums worldwide to democratize the frontier, build trust, and coordinate how society navigates the rapid acceleration of technological progress. All attendees and organizers at events affiliated with The AI Collective agree to our privacy policy and are subject to our code of conduct.