Welcome to the course!

1. Welcome to the course!

Hello and welcome to this course on building AI agents using Haystack!

2. Meet your instructor

I’m Bilge from deepset, and I’ll be your instructor for this course. In this course, you’ll learn how to build smart AI agents using Haystack. Whether you're new to agents or just new to Haystack, you're in the right place.

3. About the agent: a healthcare agent

You won’t just be learning about agents in theory. You’ll actually build one step by step with real components, tools, and data. And this won’t be a generic agent either. You’ll create a healthcare agent that can respond to user queries by combining up-to-date online information with private, structured patient data.

4. About the agent: a healthcare agent

Your agent will be able to access the web to fetch current medical insights — like treatment guidelines or drug interactions and query an SQL database that holds patient records: things like age, conditions, and prescribed medications.

5. Meet your framework: Haystack

We’ll be using Haystack to build our agent. Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework — built for AI engineers, data scientists, and Python developers. It gives us the tools to build real-world, compound, agentic systems that can reason, retrieve, act, and respond like autonomous agents, multi-modal apps, or scalable RAG systems. Haystack is designed to be modular and model-agnostic — meaning we can build our system with our choice of LLMs and tools, without being locked into one provider or platform.

6. Haystack with tools

Additionally, in this course, we’ll be using OpenAI as our LLM provider and to let the agent search the web, we’ll connect it to the Google Search API through Serper.

7. How we'll be building

The format of this course will mix conceptual discussions with hands-on coding in DataCamp’s DataLab environment. During the coding parts, we’ll walk through writing and running code step by step, so you can follow along even if you’re not an AI expert. By the end of this course, you’ll not only understand how agents work, but you’ll also have a working prototype that can interpret natural language queries, make smart decisions, and act on them using the right tools at the right time.

8. Let's practice!

Let’s get started. In the next exercise, we’ll start exploring Haystack components by talking to a language model directly. Understanding how to communicate with LLMs is the first step toward building a complete agent.

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