Rice Business  ·  Spring 2027

Agentic AI:
Personal and Enterprise

led by Kerry Back

This course is about working with agentic AI on your own tasks and putting it to work inside an organization. It opens with what a large language model actually does, how the current models differ, and how to get dependable results from them on data and documents. It then turns to the machinery underneath — the tools and harnesses an agent runs on, what a sandbox does and does not contain, and the instructions that persist from one session to the next — and to customizing that machinery with skills and plugins you write and distribute. The later weeks build and evaluate AI-enabled software, ground it in your own documents through retrieval and fine-tuning, and end with the work that has to stay in-house: running models on your own hardware and de-identifying data before it goes anywhere else.

WEEK 1
How LLMs work  ·  the universe of models  ·  data analysis and docs  ·  effective use of AI
WEEK 2
Agent tools and harnesses  ·  sandboxed agents  ·  system prompts  ·  persistent instructions
WEEK 3
Creating custom skills  ·  distributing custom skills and scripts as plugins
WEEK 4
Creating AI-enabled software  ·  evaluating models
WEEK 5
Retrieval-augmented generation  ·  fine-tuning small models
WEEK 6
Running models locally  ·  de-identifying tables and text
MGMT 675  ·  Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University kerry.e.back@rice.edu