You write the agent yourself in C#, starting from a raw HTTP call and finishing with something other programs can call. Two days, and an honest answer about when an agent is the wrong tool.
September 14-15, 2026, Oslo, Norway. 16,990 NOK plus VAT, 2-day workshop pass. NDC Oslo sells the seat and handles the booking.
Already going? It runs the Monday and Tuesday before the talks start.
At NDC AI Oslo in June 2026, all 20 people who filled in the feedback form rated both the instructor and the content Very Good. Read the feedback.
Want it for your team instead? Black Lab Studios runs it privately.
Somebody at your company has already shipped an agent. It books meetings, or it triages support tickets, or it reads invoices and decides something about them. You've seen the demo. What you haven't seen is the code, and you have a suspicion that the demo and the code are quite far apart.
They usually are. A chat box wired to an API is a weekend. An agent that reasons about real data, calls tools without going off the rails, remembers what you told it ten minutes ago and doesn't leak your database to a prompt injection is a different piece of engineering.
What you build
One thing, across two days: a personal finance assistant. It reads a question in plain language, pulls actual transaction data, holds the thread of a conversation, and tells you something useful about your money.
We start with a raw HTTP call to a model. No SDK, no framework, nothing hiding the mechanics. Then we refactor behind a clean abstraction and keep building on it, so that by the end you can look at any agent library and recognise what it's doing, because you already wrote it once by hand.
Day one is the machinery: the model, tool calling, the loop. Day two is everything that stands between a working prototype and something you'd let a colleague use. Memory that doesn't blow the context window. Prompt injection. Asking before it deletes anything. Knowing what it did after the fact.
What this isn't
Not a tour of frameworks. Not a slide deck about what agents might mean for your industry. And not a two-day argument that agents are the answer, because they often aren't. A decent slice of day two is about telling the difference between a problem that needs an agent and a problem that needs a function call, which is a cheaper and more reliable thing to own.
Is this for you?
If you build APIs in C# and you'd rather learn by writing code than by watching someone else's, yes. You don't need any AI background beyond having heard of prompts and completions.
Before you come
Set up the Azure account at home. Every workshop where people do it in the room loses the first hour, and the first hour is the one where we write the raw call that everything else is built on.
You build one thing across the two days: a personal finance assistant that reads natural language, pulls real transaction data, remembers what you told it earlier, and gives you an answer you can check. We use Azure AI services, and the code moves to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google by changing a line.
We start at the metal, with a raw HTTP call and no library in the way. Then we refactor behind an abstraction you keep using for the rest of the two days.
Up to here it can only talk. Now it starts doing things, and you find out that a tool the model quietly ignores is worse than no tool at all.
Feed the tool result back in and let it decide what happens next. Then put a ceiling on it, before it decides to do that four hundred times.
Every turn starts from nothing unless you carry the history yourself. Carrying it naively walks into the context window at full speed.
The part the demos skip. Make it safe enough to put in front of someone who is not you.
Right now it only runs where you run it. Give it an interface another program can call, then see what a framework would have done for you.
The last time this ran in Oslo, at NDC AI in June 2026, all 20 people who filled in the feedback form rated both the instructor and the content "Very Good". The forms are anonymous, so the quotes below carry no names.
Gui was an excellent instructor, fantastic pace, good explanations and analogies. Covered each topic in depth.
Top notch workshop! The content was relevant and easy to follow, even without prior knowledge about the topic.
The instructor teaches abstract concepts by using hands-on techniques in an efficient way... his teaching style which is engaged, inspiring and honest.
When this runs in public it runs at a conference, and the conference sells the seat. Registration goes to them, not to me.
2-Day Intensive
Already going? It runs the Monday and Tuesday before the talks start.
2-Day Intensive
Already going? It runs the Tuesday and Wednesday before the talks start.
2-Day Intensive
Already going? It runs the Monday and Tuesday before the talks start.
Private sessions run on-site or remote, against the codebase your team actually works in. Black Lab Studios, the company I founded, handles the scoping and the contract. I run the room.