The Oxford Agentic Bootcamp

Most people are still using AI like a search engine - asking it questions, one at a time. This is the day you learn to build systems that do the work for you.

The Oxford Agentic Bootcamp is a practical, hands-on day for people who want to put agentic AI to work in their organisation. It assumes you already use AI day to day. It doesn't assume you can code - you won't need to.

In a small group, you'll build and run a working agentic workflow - something that does a real job in your work - and leave with a clear picture of exactly what it takes to roll one out where you work.

What we'll cover

How we got here - and the real difference between prompting and agentic systems

The essentials - running lean sprints and pinning down the job to be done

The tools that matter - Claude, Cowork, Claude Code, Codex, and where each one fits

Finding your use case - examples by industry, plus a hands-on discovery exercise

Building a system - designing skills, then a multi-agent workflow, and where to keep a human in the loop

Implementing it for real - the security and stakeholder questions that decide whether it sticks

What's coming next

You'll leave with

A working agentic workflow you built yourself, and a concrete plan for introducing agentic AI into your organisation.

Your hosts

Drummond Gilbert, who tutors in AI in Management at Saïd Business School, runs Oxford's Practical AI meetup, together with Dr Emine Gokce Phillips (AI Centre for Business), Jonathan Waddingham (CPO, ex-JustGiving) and Nicolai Thomson (Serial founder and AI builder).

Quotes from previous bootcamps

Kirsten Samuel (CEO, Kamwell) - "Best, most practical AI session I have attended to date - highly recommend it!"

Lu Yan (DfE) - "I walked away with a fully functional agentic workflow and a concrete plan to roll it out."

Gareth English - "This approach totally changed my approach to creating agentic solutions. Make sure you don't miss this next time it's on."

Dr Zeynep Hizir - "I left with more than ideas. I left with something I could apply the following week. That is the test of a good bootcamp."