Ai 101: Agents and Automation Foundations

The flagship session - the 101 - the doorway to everything else and for this week only its a FREE open house session.Two hands-on hours on how agentic systems actually work and how to design them for real use. You leave having configured your environment, built a working agent, and understood the architecture well enough to apply it across any platform you choose. Runs every Thursday through September. Each session stands on its own, so start any week. This week only: free open house.FULL DESCRIPTION Most people open Claude or ChatGPT and just start typing. Moving into an office and never arranging the furniture works the same way. The flagship class at Triton Emergent Academies. Runs every Thursday, and each session stands on its own. WHAT YOU'LL DO Working session. Bring a laptop, your phone, and whatever AI tools you currently use. We work with the most available frontier models, and the underlying principles transfer across all of them. Configure your environment. Most people skip this entirely. Custom instructions tell your AI who you are, how you think, what you care about, and how you want responses structured. Five minutes. Changes every interaction from that point forward. Learn the converging architecture. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot are all building the same structure: environment, instructions, project container, skills, scheduled tasks. Learn the pattern once, apply it anywhere. Don't marry a brand. Marry the architecture. Build your first agent. An agent is defined by intent and persona, a unit designed to execute a specific type of work with a defined cognitive approach - you'll learn a sense of how and why personification design matters. Understand the three tiers of automation. Copilot (you drive, it assists) to Agent (you assign a goal, it executes the steps) to System (agents coordinating agents). You'll know where you are in that stack and where to go next. WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH The Triton Trio. Three production-tested agents, refined over three-plus years of real use, yours to keep as a Custom GPT or as raw instructions for any platform. A functional persona/agent tuned to who you are and how you operate for more effective conversations regardless of platform. The 6-Stage Workflow. A practical map from concept to finished output: Ideate, Research, Refine, Build, Communicate, Teach, with the right tool for each stage. Operating principles and mental models grounded in architecture. Your understanding travels with you across platforms because it's built on structure, not on any single tool. WHO THIS IS FOR Curious professionals, builders, and decision-makers who want to work with AI as a designer. Parents and students who want to understand what's actually happening inside these systems. People who have been using AI tools casually and want to get serious about it. Some light prior experience assumed. If you've opened ChatGPT or Claude at least once, you're ready. Capable builders will still find depth worth their time. Bring: Laptop. Phone. Curiosity. YOUR FACILITATOR Zak Morris Founder, Triton Emergent Academies. AI and Cybersecurity Engineer (CISSP, GCCC). Has been architecting agentic systems in production since before it was a recognized practice area, across healthcare, finance, logistics, and governance. Runs his own operations on the same stack he teaches. On a mission to evolve the relationship between people and technology. LOCATION The Pit, 2nd Floor, 2500 Building, Bentonville ARTriton Emergent Academies is the education division of Triton Ventures. ( www.tritonventues.io)