Building Your First AI Agent with OpenAI

Coursera MOOC / Non-credit USD 49
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Building Your First AI Agent with OpenAI

About this course

The Building Your First AI Agent with OpenAI course provides a practical introduction to creating intelligent, tool-using AI agents. Learners begin by understanding the key differences between reactive chatbots and proactive agents, mapping out the five core components of agentic architecture. The course then explores the OpenAI Responses API, GPT-4/5 models, and built-in tools such as browser, code interpreter, and file search, showing how they extend agent capabilities for real-world tasks. Through guided lessons, learners configure secure API access, manage tokens and costs, and design system prompts that define agent behavior. They also add reasoning patterns like chain-of-thought and reflection to improve reliability, before integrating multiple tools into a unified agent system. Hands-on projects, including building a technical support agent, reinforce skills in architecture design, tool integration, and performance optimization. By the end, learners will have built a fully functioning AI agent capable of handling complex multi-step tasks and decision-making with autonomy and reliability.

What you'll learn

  • Understand the architecture of proactive AI agents
  • Utilize the OpenAI Responses API and relevant models
  • Design effective system prompts to guide agent behavior
  • Integrate multiple tools into a cohesive AI system
  • Implement reasoning patterns to improve agent reliability

Course objectives

  • To familiarize learners with the key components of agentic architecture
  • To enable learners to manage API access and costs effectively
  • To help learners create a technical support AI agent

Skills you'll gain

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