ServiceNow Podcasts Building AI Agents with Lena Hall
Dec 17, 2025
Lena Hall, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Akamai, dives into the world of AI agents and their reliability. She defines how agents act as connections between reasoning loops and code. Lena discusses current trends in agent adoption, emphasizing iterative development. She warns about context challenges and the importance of clear specifications. The conversation touches on the rise of specialization in engineering roles, exploring the distinctions between generative models and rule-based systems. Lena's insights offer a fresh perspective on building effective AI agents.
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A Casual Drink And Friendly Start
- Lena jokes she's drinking handcrafted water while preferring sweet tea and lemonade mixes.
- The casual exchange sets a friendly tone before diving into technical topics.
Agents Are LLM Wrappers With Tools
- An agent is effectively a wrapper around an LLM API that connects to tools and deterministic code in a reasoning loop.
- Building useful agents is both an art and software engineering, requiring input/output management and product evaluation.
Three Practical Ways To Start Building Agents
- Start by either using an agent builder, adopting a popular framework, or building from scratch depending on experience.
- Experiment with parameters and tools to learn orchestration and how frameworks abstract philosophies.