Build an Agent Day - Charlotte
About this Event
Build an Agent Day - Charlotte
Walk in with a workflow you hate. Walk out with an agent that does it for you.
Build An Agent Day is a one-day, hands-on workshop where you codify a real task from your job as a working AI agent — and leave with the design pattern to do it again and again. No slide decks to take home. By 6 PM you have something running against your own Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account.
It's a program of All Things AI and All Things Open, built for the people who do the work: business professionals, government leaders, and K-12 and higher-ed educators. If you can write a clear how-to email, you can build an agent here.
What you'll build
Over eight hours, you'll build the same workflow across three agent stacks and pick the one that fits your environment:
- Claude Cowork (Anthropic) — for knowledge workers
- ChatGPT Agents (OpenAI) — for enterprise IT
- Manus — for research-heavy roles
The arc: pick a workflow you own (reports, intake, scheduling, drafting, research), capture your expertise as a skill an AI can follow, wire it into your stack, and ship it the same day. You'll demo it before you leave.
A sample of the day
- Crack Open the Agent — the three primitives (model, tools, memory) and the agent loop, narrated tool call by tool call
- Pick Your First Three Agents — Mark's S.M.A.R.T. framework to sort your tasks by AI readiness and match each to AI, Human, or Both
- Write Your First Skill — the anatomy of a SKILL.md, plus worked examples including an "anti-slop" quality skill and a composed website-audit skill
- Ship an Autonomous Research Agent — build a Morning Brief in Manus that triages email, preps your calendar, and ranks the day's industry news
- Working lunch, three stacks, three tables — poke at all three with food in front of you
The full eight-hour arc runs at every city stop. Because every workshop is live, the schedule flexes to the room.
Who's teaching
Mark Hinkle — Workshop instructor. Founder of The AIE Network (250,000+ subscribers), co-founder of All Things AI, 30+ years in emerging tech across cloud.com, the Linux Foundation, and the Node.js Foundation. An operator, not a consultant.
Todd Lewis — Co-founder, All Things Open. More than a decade running technology events in the Carolinas (POSCON, Open Source 101, All Things Open).
What's included
- Eight hours of hands-on building
- All three agent stacks
- Meals and materials
- The working agent you walk out with
- A year of community access across All Things Open, All Things AI, and The AIE Network — meetups, virtual events, and ongoing learning
Pricing
- Early bird: $297 (first 100 registrants)
- Standard: $397
All tiers are all-inclusive. Most employers reimburse the ticket under professional development or continuing education budgets — receipts formatted for expense reports available on request.
Agenda
🕑: 08:00 AM - 09:00 AM
Registration, coffee, and welcome.
Info: Pick up your badge, grab Carolina coffee, and meet the cohort you'll be building alongside. Bring the laptop you actually use at work, signed in to your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account.
🕑: 09:00 AM - 09:15 AM
Welcome & Introductions.
Info: Co-founders Mark Hinkle (The AIE Network) and Todd Lewis (All Things Open) open the day with what every attendee ships before sundown: three working agents and a method for building more on Monday. Ground rules: build first, debate later.
🕑: 09:15 AM - 10:00 AM
Crack Open the Agent.
Info: By the end of this block you can draw an agent on a napkin and explain what each piece does. We cover the three primitives — model, tools, memory — and the agent loop (plan, act, observe, repeat). Live demo: the same task done badly (no tools) and done well (tools + memory), narrated tool call by tool call.
You walk out with: a working mental model of how agents think and act.
🕑: 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Pick Your First Three Agents (S.M.A.R.T. in action).
Info: Pick Your First Three Agents (S.M.A.R.T. in action). Before you build anything, you need to know what to build. We use Mark's S.M.A.R.T. framework as the planning tool: Sort your tasks by AI readiness, then Match each one to AI, Human, or Both (human-in-the-loop). You leave with three real tasks from your job ready to become agents — and a clear list of work that stays human.
You walk out with: three real tasks earmarked to become agents today.
🕑: 10:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Morning break. Refill, regroup, hit the hallway track.
🕑: 10:45 AM - 11:30 AM
Write Your First Skill.
Info: Skills are how you turn a generic agent into one that does YOUR job. We cover the anatomy of a SKILL.md, the trigger-description problem, and two worked examples: the Anti-Slop Skill — a small file that refuses to let weak writing ship, with banned words, vague-claim detection, and em-dash policing; and the Website Audit Skill — a composed skill that orchestrates Lighthouse, SEO checks, and Anti-Slop into one prioritized fix list. Plus the self-improving pattern: every skill keeps a Lessons Learned log it reads before the next run.
You walk out with: a working SKILL.md plus the Anti-Slop starter installed.
🕑: 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM
Ship an Autonomous Research Agent (Manus).
Info: Build Your Morning Brief — an autonomous agent that collates three inputs into one daily readout: email triaged by importance, today's calendar with per-meeting prep notes, and the day's industry news ranked by relevance. Manus does the work; you read the result with coffee at 6 AM. We use a workshop test account for the live build, then cover what's safe to wire to real accounts at home vs. what should wait for the Workspace Agents session.
You walk out with: an autonomous morning brief running on a 6 AM schedule. Best fit: research-heavy roles, executives, founders.
🕑: 12:15 PM - 01:15 PM
Working lunch · Three stacks, three tables.
Info: Lunch on us. Three tables, three stacks running side-by-side — Claude Cowork, ChatGPT Agents, and Manus — so you can poke at all three with food in front of you and the people who built the patterns within reach.
🕑: 01:15 PM - 02:30 PM
Put an Agent to Work on Your Data (ChatGPT Workspace Agents).
Info: OpenAI's agentic mode lives where your data and team already live. We wire up Workspace Agents against a real data source you use — Drive, email, or your CRM — define an agent's job and trigger, set up a human checkpoint before anything goes live, and ship it. Real plays we walk through: customer-service triage, sales intel from CRM, internal helpdesk for HR or IT.
You walk out with: a Workspace Agent running against your inbox, docs, or drive. Best fit: enterprise IT, sales/revenue ops, internal-tools teams.
🕑: 02:30 PM - 02:45 PM
Afternoon break. Last refuel before the closing block.
🕑: 02:45 PM - 04:00 PM
Build the Agent That Knows Your Job (Claude Cowork)
Info: Anthropic's desktop agent built for non-developers — local file access, persistent memory, your skills library. We drop in the SKILL.md you stubbed out in the morning, wire up a connector you actually use (Slack, Notion, Gmail), run an end-to-end workflow that touches your real work, install Anti-Slop alongside it so nothing slop-tier ships, and schedule the whole thing as a recurring agent. You walk out with an agent already part of your workflow, not a demo you'll forget by Monday.
You walk out with: a personal, file-grounded agent wired to your tools. Best fit: knowledge workers automating their own jobs; government staff handling intake, drafting, and reporting.
🕑: 04:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Turn Drafts You'd Reject Into Output You'd Ship.
Info: AI output quality is directly proportional to input quality. We teach the weekly refinement habit that takes an agent from a 3 to a 9: rate today's outputs as used-as-is, edited, or rewrote; for anything you'd rewrite, diagnose why; update your prompt or SKILL.md and append a lesson learned. Refined prompts and skills beat better models — every time.
You walk out with: a weekly refinement habit that compounds week over week.
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Q&A
Info: Mark's Monday-morning punch list — starter agents ranked by ROI — plus quick coverage of governance and what data should never touch an agent. Then open mic for the questions you saved up while building: What stack should we standardize on? How do we govern this internally? How do we explain it to leadership? Bring it.
You walk out with: a ranked punch list of agents to build first this week.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 318.76 to USD 425.47
