Build Your First ADK Agent Workforce

Source: Dev.to

The world of Generative AI is evolving rapidly, and AI Agents are at the forefront of this change. An AI agent is a software system designed to act on your behalf, showing reasoning, planning, and memory, with enough autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt.

At its core, an AI agent uses a large language model (LLM), such as Gemini, to understand and reason. This enables the agent to process information from various sources, create a plan, and execute a series of tasks to reach a predefined objective—unlike a simple prompt‑and‑response, an agent can act on a multi‑step plan.

The great news is that you can now easily build your own AI agents, even without deep expertise, thanks to the Agent Development Kit (ADK). ADK is an open‑source Python and Java framework by Google designed to simplify agent creation.

Build Your First Agent

This lab introduces the foundational principles of ADK by guiding you through the construction of a personal assistant agent. You will write the code for the agent itself and interact directly with its core reasoning engine, powered by Gemini, to see how it responds to a simple request. This lab focuses on building the fundamental scaffolding that every agent you create will share.

Empower Your Agent with Tools

An agent without custom tools can only rely on its built‑in knowledge. To make it more powerful for your specific use case, you can give it access to specialized tools. In this lab you will learn three different ways to add tools:

• Build a Custom Tool – Write a currency‑exchange tool from scratch.
• Integrate a Built‑in Tool – Add ADK’s pre‑built Google Search tool.
• Leverage a Third‑Party Tool – Import and use a Wikipedia tool from the LangChain library.

Lab: Empower ADK Agents with Tools – Learn how to make your agent truly useful by giving it tools to interact with external applications and services.

Build a Team of Specialized Agents

When a task is too complex for a single agent, you can build a multi‑agent team. This lab dives into the power of multi‑agent systems by having you construct a “movie pitch development team” that can research, write, and analyze a film concept.

You will learn how to use ADK’s Workflow Agents to control the flow of work automatically, without needing user input at every step, and how to use session state to pass information between agents.

Lab: Build Multi‑Agent Systems with ADK – Orchestrate a complex, automated workflow with a team of specialized agents that work in sequence, in loops, and in parallel.

Summary

Ready to build your first AI agents? Dive into the codelabs referenced above:

• Building AI Agents with ADK: The Foundation
• Empower ADK Agents with Tools
• Build Multi‑Agent Systems with ADK

These labs are part of the Developing Agents module in the official Production‑Ready AI with Google Cloud program. Explore the full curriculum for more content that will help you bridge the gap from a promising prototype to a production‑grade AI application.