## Designing Stateful AI Agents Without Overengineering

Hosted by Dr. Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

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**In this video**

- **00:00:37** Introduction & Welcome  
- **00:04:19** Common Failures of AI Agents  
- **00:07:38** Introduction to the N8n Platform  
- **00:11:22** The Difference Between Chatbots and AI Agents  
- **00:13:34** Short-Term vs. Long-Term Memory for Agents  
- **00:18:04** A Walkthrough of the N8n Interface  
- **00:25:48** Building an Agent with Memory in N8n  
- **00:29:21** Live Demo: Agent Memory in Action  
- **00:32:45** Five Design Principles for Stateful Agents  
- **00:34:43** Q&A and Conclusion

**What you'll learn**
- Build a stateful AI agent end-to-end in n8n
- Design and implement a complete n8n agent workflow with state, memory, and control flow that behaves consistently.
- Design agent state and control without overengineering
- Model memory, decisions, and tool usage using simple n8n patterns instead of complex agent frameworks.
- Test, debug, and iterate on agent behavior

Most AI agents fail not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack structure. Teams often jump straight to complex agent frameworks when a simple, stateful workflow would work better. This session shows how to design agents as systems, using n8n to make behavior explicit, debuggable, and extensible.

### You'll learn from

**Dr. Aki Wijesundara**  
AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI researcher, educator, and founder with a PhD in Machine Learning and experience at Google's AI Accelerator. He has taught over 5,000+ engineers, founders, and product leaders worldwide how to build production-ready AI systems using LangChain, RAG pipelines, and MLOps frameworks.

**Career highlights**  
- Ex–Google AI Accelerator researcher focused on responsible AI and applied ML.
- PhD in AI & Cognitive Systems with published research across top universities.  
- Co-founder of Snapdrum — delivered AI systems for finance, education, and healthcare.

**Manu Jayawardana**  
Exited AI Founder (Rise AI: 35k Users) | Co-Founder of Krybe and Snapdrum.com

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes. He is currently the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions.

**Career highlights**  
- Co-Founder of Snapdrum — builds production-ready AI systems for Fortune 500s, YC startups, and global Series A–C companies.
- Exited Founder of Rise AI — created an AI investment copilot used by 35,000+ users worldwide.

**Previous students from**

### Go deeper with a course

**AI Product Management Certificate**

**Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana**  
AI Advisor | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum. AI Advisor | Founder, TAI Labs  
[View syllabus](/content/tailabs/ai-pm-cert/index.html)

### Watch

**Build An Agentic AI Product End to End, No Code**  
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**Building production-ready AI Agents for Software Engineers**

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