Acknowledgment

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the many individuals and teams who made this book possible.

First and foremost, I thank Google for adhering to its mission, empowering Googlers, and respecting the opportunity to innovate.

I am grateful to the Office of the CTO for giving me the opportunity to explore new areas, for adhering to its mission of “practical magic,” and for its capacity to adapt to new emerging opportunities.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Will Grannis, our VP, for the trust he puts in people and for being a servant leader. To John Abel, my manager, for encouraging me to pursue my activities and for always providing great guidance with his British acumen.I extend my gratitude to Antoine Larmanjat for our work on LLMs in code, Hann Hann Wang for agent discussions, and Yingchao Huang for time series insights. Thanks to Ashwin Ram for leadership, Massy Mascaro for inspiring work, Jennifer Bennett for technical expertise, Brett Slatkin for engineering, and Eric Schen for stimulating discussions. The OCTO team, especially Scott Penberthy, deserves recognition. Finally, deep appreciation to Patricia Florissi for her inspiring vision of Agents’ societal impact.

My appreciation also goes to Marco Argenti for the challenging and motivating vision of agents augmenting the human workforce. My thanks also go to Jim Lanzone and Jordi Ribas for pushing the bar on the relationship between the world of Search and the world of Agents.

I am also indebted to the Cloud AI teams, especially their leader Saurabh Tiwary, for driving the AI organization towards principled progress. Thank you to Salem Salem Haykal, the Area Technical Leader, for being an inspiring colleague. My thanks to Vladimir Vuskovic, co-founder of Google Agentspace, Kate (Katarzyna) Olszewska for our Agentic collaboration on Kaggle Game Arena, and Nate Keating for driving Kaggle with passion, a community that has given so much to AI. My thanks also to Kamelia Aryafa, leading applied AI and ML teams focused on Agentspace and Enterprise NotebookLM, and to Jahn Wooland, a true leader focused on delivering and a personal friend always there to provide advice.

A special thanks to Yingchao Huang for being a brilliant AI engineer with a great career in front of you, Hann Wang for challenging me to return to my interest in Agents after an initial interest in 1994, and to Lee Boonstra for your amazing work on prompt engineering.

My thanks also go to the 5 Days of GenAI team, including our VP Alison Wagonfeld for the trust put in the team, Anant Nawalgaria for always delivering, and Paige Bailey for her can-do attitude and leadership.

I am also deeply grateful to Mike Styer, Turan Bulmus, and Kanchana Patlolla for helping me ship three Agents at Google I/O 2025. Thank you for your immense work.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to Thomas Kurian for his unwavering leadership, passion, and trust in driving the Cloud and AI initiatives. I also deeply appreciate Emanuel Taropa, whose inspiring “can-do” attitude made him the most exceptional colleague I’ve encountered at Google, setting a truly profound example. Finally, thanks to Fiona Cicconi for our engaging discussions about Google.

I extend my gratitude to Demis Hassabis, Pushmeet Kohli, and the entire GDM team for their passionate efforts in developing Gemini, AlphaFold, AlphaGo, and AlphaGenome, among other projects, and for their contributions to advancing science for the benefit of society. A special thank you to Yossi Matias for his leadership of Google Research and for consistently offering invaluable advice. I have learned a great deal from you.

A special thanks to Patti Maes, who pioneered the concept of Software Agents in the 90s and remains focused on the question of how computer systems and digital devices might augment people and assist them with issues such as memory, learning, decision making, health, and wellbeing. Your vision back in ‘91 became a reality today.

I also want to extend my gratitude to Paul Drougas and all the Publisher team at Springer for making this book possible.

I am deeply indebted to the many talented people who helped bring this book to life. My heartfelt thanks go to Marco Fago for his immense contributions, from code and diagrams to reviewing the entire text. I’m also grateful to Mahtab Syed for his coding work and to Ankita Guha for her incredibly detailed feedback on so many chapters. The book was significantly improved by the insightful amendments from Priya Saxena, the careful reviews from Jae Lee, and the dedicated work of Mario da Roza in creating the NotebookLM version. I was fortunate to have a team of expert reviewers for the initial chapters, and I thank Dr. Amita Kapoor, Fatma Tarlaci, PhD, Dr. Alessandro Cornacchia, and Aditya Mandlekar for lending their expertise. My sincere appreciation also goes to Ashley Miller, A Amir John, and Palak Kamdar (Vasani) for their unique contributions. For their steadfast support and encouragement, a final, warm thank you is due to Rajat Jain, Aldo Pahor, Gaurav Verma, Pavithra Sainath, Mariusz Koczwara, Abhijit Kumar, Armstrong Foundjem, Haiming Ran, Udita Patel, and Kaurnakar Kotha.

This project truly would not have been possible without you. All the credit goes to you, and all the mistakes are mine.

All my royalties are donated to Save the Children.