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Agents at Work: How AI Systems Take Action in the Real World
Thu, Oct 9, 2025
6 PM – 8 PM EDT (GMT-4)
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The CBS Women's Circle presents
Agents at Work: How AI Systems Take Action in the Real World
Date: Thursday, October 9, 2025
Time: 6pm-8pm
Location: A venue near Union Square (precise location will be shared with all registrants)
RSVP is required. Need help with your UNI or password? Please use CUIT's alumni UNI tool.
This event is limited to CBS alumni only, and registration is required. For guidance regarding your UNI and password, please refer to CUIT's alumni UNI tool; for additional help, please email techsup@gsb.columbia.edu. For assistance regarding the event or registration, please reach out to womenscircle@gsb.columbia.edu.
A note regarding cancellations: refunds will only be issued to those registrants who cancel by Wednesday, October 8. This policy ensures that we can provide an accurate number of anticipated attendees for the venue that evening. Thank you for your understanding.
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Lecture Overview
Agents at Work: How AI Systems Take Action in the Real World
AI is rapidly transforming society, and the most recent frontier lies in agentic systems. While large language models began as powerful compression engines—distilling humanity’s knowledge into natural language interfaces—the real shift comes when these models are coupled with the ability to take actions in the outside world. Today’s agents go beyond chatbots: they can orchestrate complex tool use, autonomously determine sequences of steps, and integrate with APIs to book flights, update spreadsheets, or prepare briefing decks. This session will survey recent advances in agentic systems, from controlled flows to end-to-end automation, and examine how these systems are trained to use tools through simulated environments and reinforcement learning. We will explore both the new opportunities and risks posed by agents—how they reshape workflows and decision-making, how they can reproduce existing power structures, and how organizations might govern, communicate, and mitigate potential harms as agents become embedded in businesses.
Dress Business Casual
Food Provided (Grazing tables of charcuterie and accompaniments provided, vegetarian, dairy-free, and gluten-free options available. Full bar of curated wines, beers, and non-alcoholic beverages.)
Speakers
Hongseok Namkoong
Assistant Professor of Business. Decision, Risk, and Operations Division
Columbia Business School
linkedin.com/in/hongseok-namkoong-b0214336
Hongseok Namkoong is an assistant professor in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at Columbia Business School and a member of the Data Science Institute. He works on building trustworthy AI systems that are capable of solving real-world decision-making problems. Taking a data-centric view of AI systems, Hong is a strong believer in algorithmic ideas simultaneously grounded in empirical foundations and principled thinking. As an interdisciplinary researcher, he connects and extends tools from machine learning, operations research, and statistics. Read this overview of his research to learn more about his impact-driven agenda. Hong’s research has been recognized at leading AI and OR research outlets, including paper awards at NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, and INFORMS Applied Probability Society.
Before joining Columbia, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and spent a year at Meta’s Adaptive Experimentation team as a research scientist. Outside of academia, he serves as a LinkedIn Scholar at LinkedIn’s Core AI team.
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