The day
Eight hours, three working agents.
Below is a sample agenda — the eight-hour arc we run at every city stop. Because every workshop is live and in a room with you, we have the freedom to flex the schedule to address the needs of the class. If the cohort wants more time on Claude Cowork and less on Manus, we adjust. If governance questions are blocking adoption at your agency, we deepen that thread. The outcomes don't change. The path we take to get there might.
The full eight-hour arc.
Registration and coffee at 8 AM; a working agent demoed before you leave at 5 PM.
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8:00 – 9:00 AM Registration
Registration, coffee, and welcome
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.
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9:00 – 9:15 AM Keynote
Welcome & Introductions
Co-founders Mark Hinkle (The AIE Network) and Todd Lewis (All Things Open) open the day with what every attendee will ship before sundown: three working agents and a method for building more on Monday. Ground rules: build first, debate later.
Mark Hinkle & Todd Lewis
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9:15 – 10:00 AM Workshop
Crack Open the Agent
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
Mark Hinkle (workshop instructor) · All attendees — biz, gov, education
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10:00 – 10:30 AM Workshop
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 this block 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
Mark Hinkle · All attendees
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10:30 – 10:45 AM Break
Morning break
Refill, regroup, hit the hallway track.
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10:45 – 11:30 AM Workshop
Write Your First Skill
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: (1) the Anti-Slop Skill — a small file that refuses to let slop ship, with banned words, vague-claim detection, and em-dash policing; (2) 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
Mark Hinkle · All attendees
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11:30 AM – 12:15 PM Workshop
Ship an Autonomous Research Agent (Manus)
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
Mark Hinkle · Best fit: research-heavy roles, executives, founders
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12:15 – 1:15 PM Lunch
Working lunch · Three stacks, three tables
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.
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1:15 – 2:30 PM Workshop
Put an Agent to Work on Your Data (ChatGPT Workspace Agents)
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
Mark Hinkle · Best fit: enterprise IT, sales/revenue ops, internal-tools teams
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2:30 – 2:45 PM Break
Afternoon break
Last refuel before the closing block.
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2:45 – 4:00 PM Workshop
Build the Agent That Knows Your Job (Claude Cowork)
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
Mark Hinkle · Best fit: knowledge workers automating their own jobs · government staff handling intake, drafting, and reporting
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4:00 – 4:30 PM Workshop
Turn Drafts You'd Reject Into Output You'd Ship
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
Mark Hinkle · All attendees
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4:30 – 5:00 PM Q&A
Your Monday Plan + Q&A
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
Mark Hinkle · All attendees
This is a sample agenda; because every workshop is live, the schedule flexes to the room. The outcomes don't change. The path we take to get there might.