The Institute of Business Administration’s Centre for Information and Communication Technologies (IBA CICT) hosted an AI Agents for Engineers workshop at its City Campus, bringing together professionals and aspiring AI practitioners for an immersive, hands-on learning experience led by Dr Faisal Iradat. Over two days, participants worked through the architecture, development, deployment, integration, and governance of intelligent AI agents, with the sessions structured to bridge the gap between abstract AI concepts and how those systems actually get applied in real world business settings. The workshop format followed a pattern IBA CICT has used for previous technical training programmes, combining conceptual instruction with hands-on exercises rather than relying purely on lecture based teaching.
Participants worked directly with a range of tools and frameworks central to how modern AI agents are built and deployed, including LangChain and LangGraph for agent orchestration, LangSmith for monitoring, Ollama for running models locally, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques for grounding agent responses in specific data sources. The workshop also covered Agentic AI concepts more broadly and introduced PostHog as a tool for tracking and analyzing how deployed agents perform once in use. This combination of orchestration frameworks, local model tooling, and monitoring platforms reflects the kind of practical, production oriented toolkit that AI engineering teams increasingly rely on when building agents meant to operate reliably outside of a demo environment.
The session gave participants a practical look at how AI agents can integrate with existing enterprise systems, support multi-agent workflows where several specialized agents coordinate on a task, and drive measurable business impact rather than functioning purely as experimental technology. This focus on integration and multi-agent coordination reflects a broader shift happening across the AI industry, where standalone chatbot style tools are increasingly being replaced by more complex agent systems capable of taking autonomous actions across multiple steps and connected systems. For participants working in enterprise settings, this kind of hands-on exposure to orchestration and monitoring tools offers a more direct path toward implementing similar systems within their own organizations compared to purely theoretical instruction.
The workshop adds to a growing number of AI focused training sessions being run by universities and technical institutes across Pakistan, as demand grows among working professionals and engineering students to build practical skills in agentic AI development rather than just theoretical machine learning concepts. For IBA CICT specifically, hosting a technically dense, tool focused workshop like this one reinforces the centre’s positioning as a venue for applied technology training aimed at working professionals, distinct from purely academic coursework offered through IBA’s degree programmes. Whether the skills covered translate into participants actually building and deploying agent systems within their own organizations will likely depend on how much of the two day, hands-on format they retain once back in their regular workplace settings, where full access to the same combination of tools and expert guidance may not be as readily available.
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