The platforms for creating agents are evolving at incredible speed. As with most of our classes, our goal for AI Fluency: From Prompting To Agent Orchestration is not to help you master any single platform. It’s to help you understand, as a non-technical professional, how agentic AI works and how you can use it to take operational tasks off your plate. In general, while terminology, packaging, and user interfaces vary, the underlying concepts and capabilities of the major platforms are evolving in more or less the same directions, just at different paces and costs.
As of Nov 1, 2026, we have decided to focus on teaching the January 2027 cohort of the class using instructional materials and, especially, exercises developed and using the following platforms / tools:
- Anthropic’s Claude and its associated tools (e.g. Cowork, which is being merged into Claude, Duet if it becomes generally available, etc.) - Cowork really pioneered this class of agentic tools.
- SpaceXAI’s Grok Bot platform - pioneer in the “always on” or “team of agents” model of agentic platform
- Gemini Notebook
We anticipate the cost of these tools being between $50-60/month. You may not need all 3 tools for the full length of the program. We will inform students the week before class regarding which subscription(s) they’ll need to start by the first class session.
We aren’t using tools from some of the other leading vendors for reasons of cost or availability. For example, Google has announced capabilities in the agent space but they recently delayed availability of many of those features until spring 2027. At this writing, OpenAI’s Dot feels too expensive when less expensive alternatives are available for teaching purposes. Meta’s Muse is, in our opinion, unproven as a tool for business automation while Microsoft seems more focused on the enterprise class user. All are worth monitoring and may be used in future versions of this class. In the class we will provide feature / capability comparisons for all the major tools.
