Philipp Schmid

This talk emphasizes the critical need for rigorous evaluation of AI skills before deployment, arguing that shipping skills without proper testing can lead to unpredictable behavior and degraded performance. The speaker highlights the distinction between agents developers use for personal productivity and agents built for consumers, noting that end-users lack the context to troubleshoot skill invocation issues. The core thesis is that comprehensive evaluations are essential for ensuring skill reliability, managing costs, and determining when skills can be retired as models improve.

Building AI agents presents unique challenges compared to traditional software development. Instead of acting as traffic controllers with predefined rules, engineers now function more like dispatchers, defining goals for agents without dictating every step. This shift requires embracing the non-deterministic nature of AI, treating errors as inputs, and moving from rigid unit tests to broader evaluations of agent reliability and success rates.

This talk introduces the Gemini Interactions API, a new unified API designed to simplify building with large language models and agents. It emphasizes a more developer-friendly interface, akin to industry standards, and introduces server-side state management for improved agent development. The session also showcases the Gemini Live API for real-time conversational AI applications, including audio and video processing, and demonstrates how to build a coding agent with file I/O and bash command execution capabilities.

This talk introduces the Google Gemini 2.5 model family, focusing on practical applications for AI engineers and builders. It highlights the multimodal capabilities of Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash, demonstrating how to leverage these models for text generation, image and audio understanding, function calling, and integrating with external tools via MCP servers. The session emphasizes hands-on learning through a workshop format, encouraging attendees to experiment with the models and SDK.