The archive · 22 essays · 19 talks · since 2016
Everything worth saying twice.
Eleven years of writing on AI agents by Alan Nichol, Founder & CTO of Rasa — the pragmatics of shipping ML, and why most "AI transformations" are just CRUD apps with extra steps.
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2026
02 pieces2025
09 pieces Dec 10 Inside Rasa: navigating the future of conversational AI Podcast ↗ Oct 14 Multi-agents are secretly distributed monoliths Essay ~7 min → Sep 04 Orchestrating A2A and MCP with Rasa Essay ↗ May 06 Beyond prompt-and-pray: why structured automation is the future of enterprise AI Forbes ↗ Feb 03 Self-improving CALM prompts using DeepSeek R1 Essay ↗ Jan 31 AI Unicorns: Rasa races to make it in the conversational AI market Profile ↗ Jan 29 How Rasa is revolutionising conversational AI Podcast ↗ Jan 21 Beyond prompt-and-pray O'Reilly Radar ↗ Jan 10 From NLP to LLMs: the quest for a reliable chatbot Podcast ↗
2024
10 pieces Dec 08 50M+ Downloads Unlocked: tips to building impactful Voice AI Podcast ↗ Oct 30 CALM Summit '24 keynote Keynote ↗ Oct 01 Reliable agentic bots with Llama 8B Essay ↗ Sep 19 A guide to objective and valid evaluation of chatbot implementations Essay ↗ Jun 10 Beyond Supervised Learning: the rise of in-context learning with LLMs Podcast ↗ Feb 19 Task-Oriented Dialogue with In-Context Learning Paper ↗ Feb 14 Rasa raises $30M Series C Press ↗ Feb 12 Going beyond the LLM hype: rethinking agents for production Essay ↗ 2024 Rasa CALM: conversational AI with LLMs Demo ↗ 2024 PyData Global 2024 — hands-on tutorial Tutorial ↗
2023
04 pieces2022
03 pieces2021
03 pieces2020
11 pieces Dec 17 We're a step closer to getting rid of intents Essay ↗ Aug 27 Best practices for building conversational AI applications Podcast ↗ Jul 24 What's ahead in Rasa Open Source 2.0 Essay ↗ Jul 05 Voicebot Podcast, ep. 157 Podcast ↗ Jul 2020 Perspective on the 5 levels of conversational AI Keynote ↗ Jun 17 The 5 levels of conversational AI — 2020 update Essay ↗ May 07 Conversation-driven development Essay ↗ Feb 28 Using conversation tags to measure Carbon Bot's success rate Notebook ↗ 2020 DIET: lightweight language understanding for dialogue systems Paper ↗ 2020 Rasa, GPT-3, and the future of bots Podcast ↗ 2020 On GPT-3, a world without intents, and Rasa Podcast ↗
2019
07 pieces Dec 05 It's about time we get rid of intents Essay ↗ Oct 2019 Rasa Developer Summit 2019 — opening keynote Keynote ↗ Oct 2019 Dialogue Transformers Paper ↗ Aug 31 The shift toward open source conversational AI VentureBeat ↗ Aug 07 The 5 levels of AI assistants Talk ↗ Jul 29 Building an autonomous organization with conversational AI Chatbot Summit TLV ↗ May 21 Algorithms alone won't solve conversational AI — Introducing Rasa X Essay ↗
2018
10 pieces Nov 29 Attention, dialogue, and learning reusable patterns Essay ↗ Oct 10 Deprecating the state machine: building conversational AI with the Rasa stack O'Reilly AI EU ↗ Sep 13 Using machine learning to improve dialog flow in conversational applications O'Reilly Data Show ↗ Aug 2018 Building conversational AI with the Rasa stack PyBay 2018 ↗ Aug 20 The next generation of AI assistants in enterprise O'Reilly Radar ↗ Jul 16 Chatbots, conversational software, and data science DataFramed · ep. 31 ↗ 2018 Bridging dialogue research and production systems RE•WORK ↗ May 01 Building conversational AI in-house in the Fortune 500 O'Reilly AI NY ↗ Apr 19 Supervised word vectors from scratch in Rasa NLU Notebook ↗ 2018 Few-shot generalization across dialogue tasks Paper ↗