Part 1 — Foundations of Generative and Agentic AI

Overview

Before an organisation can deploy Agentic AI, it needs to understand what it is building on. Part 1 establishes the technical and conceptual foundations that underpin everything that follows in this overview.

We begin with history — tracing the arc from the earliest statistical language models through the rule-based chatbots of the 1960s and 1990s, to the transformer-powered systems that now handle billions of conversations daily. This history is not merely academic. It explains why today's systems behave the way they do, what limitations are inherited from earlier paradigms, and what genuinely changed with the arrival of large language models.

From there, Part 1 examines two defining practical challenges of the current moment: the economics of running AI at scale, and the expanding capability of AI systems to perceive and reason across multiple types of information simultaneously.

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Chapters in This Part

Chapter	Title	Theme
1	From Statistical Models to Intelligent Systems	History and foundations
2	The Economics of AI: Capability, Speed, and Cost	Economics of deployment
3	How AI Learned to See, Hear, and Read	Multimodal AI
4	Generative AI in Practice: Where Enterprise Value Is Created	Current frontier applications

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Part 1 is the recommended starting point for all readers.