The Living Standard of Enterprise AI Engineering
In the AI age, knowledge is not enough; mastery is measured through practice.The Agentic Engineering Body of Practices (AEBOP) is the living, continuously updated field guide that defines how real intelligent systems are built, operated, and governed in production. It is the professional standard for engineers, architects, and leaders designing the next generation of enterprise-grade agentic systems.
Born from 2,000+ pages of field notes, distilled across 600+ real-world deployments in six industries, AEBOP captures the architecture patterns, operational pitfalls, and trust frameworks that emerged from the front lines of applied intelligence engineering. These are not theoretical patterns—they are lessons earned under real deadlines, real constraints, and real risks.
Developed and maintained by the Agentic Engineering Institute (AEI), AEBOP transforms raw field intelligence into practical guidance: reusable best practices, reference architectures, design patterns, code examples, templates, checklists, maturity ladders, playbooks, and anti-patterns. Everything an organization needs to turn cognition into capability—and capability into durable advantage.
Updated continuously as new AI technologies, architectures, best practices, and lessons emerge, AEBOP ensures AEI members stay ahead of the curve and ahead of the industry.
Available exclusively to AEI members, AEBOP provides the practical intelligence, professional standards, and community insights required to advance your engineering career, elevate your architectural depth, and lead AI-Native transformation across your organization.
Includes full library, regular updates, and implementation toolkits.
Practical. Proven. Continuously Evolving.
The AEBOP is more than a field manual — it’s a living library of applied intelligence engineering. Every module captures what works, what breaks, and what scales in real-world implementations of agentic systems.
Organized across 26 practice areas and 6 mastery tiers, AEBOP helps AEI members move from knowledge to mastery through structured, field-proven methods.
What it is:
Field-tested methods and implementation standards for building, operating, and governing intelligent systems.
What you’ll find:
Proven approaches for cognition, context, memory, and orchestration.
Enterprise-grade security, observability, and governance practices.
Tier-based maturity maps (L1–L5) aligned to real-world adoption stages.
What it is:
Blueprints for repeatable success — how the best agentic systems are designed.
What you’ll find:
Reference architectures for production-grade deployment.
Canonical design patterns for cognition loops, AgentOps, and trust fabrics.
Modular design recipes for interoperability and resilience.
What it is:
Runnable, ready-to-adapt examples showing Agentic Engineering in action.
What you’ll find:
Reference code examples for reasoning, memory, orchestration, and all other agentic modules.
YAML / JSON configuration templates for observability and governance policy integration.
Implementation guides for integrating AEI practices into DevOps and SDLC.
What it is:
Real-world learnings distilled from live enterprise implementations.
What you’ll find:
Case-based analyses of what succeeded, failed, and why.
Play-by-play breakdowns of scaling cognition and governance under pressure.
Lessons from healthcare, finance, manufacturing, life sciences, and other sectors.
What it is:
A living record of what not to do — and how to recover when you do.
What you’ll find:
Root-cause analyses of common architecture and cognition failures.
Anti-pattern repositories for runtime fragility, drift, and governance gaps.
Guided remediations that transform failure into institutional learning.
What it is:
Operational scaffolding for building and maintaining agentic systems.
What you’ll find:
Readiness checklists for each maturity tier.
Implementation playbooks and configuration guides.
Templates for risk, quality, and governance audits.
AEBOP is updated frequently as needed — new lessons, new architectures, new practices, new tooling, new failures analyzed — so members always have access to the latest, field-validated knowledge shaping the AI-Native enterprise frontier.
Includes full library, regular updates, and member forums for implementation support.
From Orientation to Leadership — Your Path to Agentic Mastery
Every practice in the Agentic Engineering Body of Practices (AEBOP) maps to one of six tiers — a structured path from early awareness to ecosystem-scale leadership.
Each tier closes a different class of failure, moving organizations from fragile prototypes to self-healing intelligence systems, and members from knowledge to mastery.
For all AEI members – establishing shared language, principles, and mental models.
0.1 Agentic Engineering Definition
Origins of Agentic Engineering, the Eight Laws, and the discipline’s fusion of software, AI, and cognitive science.
0.2 Agentic AI Use Cases Across Industries
Case studies from healthcare, life sciences, finance, manufacturing, and other sectors — illustrating how agents evolve from fragile prototypes to engineered cognition systems.
0.3 Agentic Team Roles & Practices
Team archetypes and responsibilities across architecture, engineering, operations, and governance.
Agentic Engineer Certification Level 1 — Building safe, observable, and governed runtime systems.
1.1 Agent Runtime Environment (ARE)
Designing containment, lifecycle control, and runtime contracts for autonomous agents.
1.2 Agentic Security Engineering
Implementing identity boundaries, runtime policies, and trust fabrics that scale securely.
1.3 Agentic Observability Engineering
Making cognition visible, measurable, and auditable—“you can’t debug what you can’t see.”
1.4 Agentic Protocol Engineering
Standardizing agent-to-agent and agent-to-system communication; the wiring harness of trust.
1.5 Agentic Governance Engineering
Embedding guardrails, approvals, and in-loop policy enforcement across the runtime.
Agentic Engineer Certification Level 2 — Engineering cognition itself: perception, reasoning, and reflection.
2.1 Agentic Knowledge Engineering
Structuring, retrieving, and governing enterprise knowledge for cognitive accuracy and grounding.
2.2 Agentic Context Engineering
Designing layered context windows, saliency routing, and drift detection.
2.3 Agentic Memory Engineering
Building bounded, identity-scoped memory that sustains continuity without leaks.
2.4 Agentic Reasoning Engineering
Designing reasoning loops as control systems—planning, deciding, acting, and reflecting.
2.5 AI Model Engineering
Integrating and evaluating specialized models as reasoning components.
2.6 Agentic Orchestration Engineering
Coordinating agents, roles, and workflows into coherent, recoverable systems.
Agentic Architect Certification Level 1 — Designing full agentic systems and cognition ecosystems.
3.1 Agentic System Design
Translating cognition into scalable architectures; from loop to system.
3.2 Agentic UX Engineering
Human-in-the-loop design for visibility, oversight, and steering.
3.3 Agentic Integration Engineering
Connecting agents to enterprise APIs and systems of record with governed boundaries.
3.4 Agentic Cognition Engineering
Closing open loops across perception, reasoning, and action into adaptive cognition systems.
3.5 Agentic Trust Engineering
Building continuous trust fabrics that unify security, governance, and observability.
Agentic Architect Certification Level 2 — Operating intelligent systems safely and reliably at scale.
4.1 AgentOps Engineering
Running autonomous systems safely in production; observability, control, recovery, and cost discipline.
4.2 Agentic Quality Assurance (AQA)
Proving cognition is correct, compliant, and trustworthy—beyond model evaluation.
4.3 Agentic System Development Lifecycle (A-SDLC)
Embedding agentic practices into continuous delivery pipelines for safe iteration.
Agentic Leader Certification — Steering enterprise transformation toward AI-native operating models.
5.1 Agentic Product Management
Turning cognition into economic flywheels, moats, and measurable ROI.
5.2 Agentic Team & Organization Design
Defining how the five agentic team structures and their shared cadences turn human collaboration into governed intelligence.
5.3 Agentic AI Maturity Model & Operating System
Assessing and guiding organizational progression from prototype to platform-scale ecosystem.
5.4 AI-Native Transformation
Leading enterprises toward systemic intelligence—where agents form adaptive ecosystems.
Each tier builds on the previous:
Tier 0 → Shared Language
Tier 1 → Runtime Integrity
Tier 2 → Cognitive Capability
Tier 3 → Systemic Design
Tier 4 → Operational Resilience
Tier 5 → Strategic Leadership
AEBOP helps you climb this ladder through hands-on methods, field examples, and certification milestones that convert learning into measurable career advancement.
Explore Your Tier and Begin Your Path to Agentic Mastery
AEBOP is freely available to individual practitioners with active AEI membership, who are encouraged to apply it in real project work, strengthen their engineering capabilities, and help advance the emerging discipline of agentic engineering. Members may use AEBOP in their design, development, architecture, and advisory activities with proper attribution.
Required attribution:
“AEBOP is developed and maintained by the Agentic Engineering Institute (AEI). Used with permission.”
Organizations that wish to scale AEBOP across teams, embed it into products, deliver AEBOP-based services, or use it for structured internal training must obtain the appropriate AEI Partnership tier to ensure alignment, governance, and responsible adoption.
For full terms, please see the AEBOP License Agreement.