Build Your First ADK Agent Workforce

Developers & PractitionersBuild Your First ADK Agent WorkforceNovember 7, 2025Mollie PettitDeveloper Relations EngineerThe world of Generative AI is evolving rapidly, and AI Agents are at the forefront of this change. An AI agent is a software system designed to act on your behalf. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt. At its core, an AI agent uses a large language model (LLM), like Gemini, as its "brain" to understand and reason. This allows it to process information from various sources, create a plan, and execute a series of tasks to reach a predefined objective. This is the key difference between a simple prompt-and-response and an agent: the ability to act on a multi-step plan. The great news is that you can now easily build your own AI agents, even without deep expertise, thanks to Agent Development Kit (ADK). ADK is an open-source Python and Java framework by Google designed to simplify agent creation. To guide you, this post introduces three hands-on labs that cover the core patterns of agent development: Building your first autonomous agent Empowering that agent with tools to interact with external services Orchestrate a multi-agent system where specialized agents collaborate Build your first agent This lab introduces the foundational principles of ADK by guiding you through the construction of a personal assistant agent. You will write the code for the agent itself and will interact directly with the agent's core reasoning engine, powered by Gemini, to see how it responds to a simple request. This lab is focused on building the fundamental scaffolding of every agent you'll create.Go to the lab!Lab: Building AI Agents with ADK:The FoundationObjective: Write the essential code to define and run a basic agent, learning the core structure of ADK.Empower your agent with tools An agent without custom tools can only rely on its built-in knowledge. To make it more powerful for your specific use-case, you can give it access to specialized tools. In this lab, you will learn three different ways to add tools: Build a Custom Tool: Write a currency exchange tool from scratch. Integrate a Built-in Tool: Add ADK's pre-built Google Search tool. Leverage a Third-Party Tool: Import and use a Wikipedia tool from the LangChain library. Go to the lab!Lab: Empower ADK Agents with ToolsObjective: Learn how to make your agent truly useful by giving it tools to interact with external applications and services.Build a Team of Specialized Agents When a task is too complex for a single agent, you can build out a multi-agent team. This lab goes deep into the power of multi-agent systems by having you build a "movie pitch development team" that can research, write, and analyze a film concept. You will learn how to use ADK's Workflow Agents to control the flow of work automatically, without needing user input at every step. You'll also learn how to use the session state to pass information between the agents.Go to the lab!Lab: Build Multi-Agent Systems with ADKObjective: Orchestrate a complex, automated workflow with a team of specialized agents that work in sequence, in loops, and in parallel.Summary: Build Your First AI Teammate Today Ready to build your first AI agents? Dive into the codelabs from this post: Building AI Agents with ADK: The Foundation Empower ADK Agents with Tools Build Multi-Agent Systems with ADK Share your progress and connect with others on the journey using the hashtag #ProductionReadyAI. Happy learning! Posted inDevelopers & PractitionersRelated articlesDevelopers & PractitionersADK architecture: When to use sub-agents versus agents as toolsBy Dharini Chandrashekhar • 7-minute readDevelopers & PractitionersEasy AI workflow automation: Deploy n8n on Cloud RunBy Ryan Pei • 3-minute readDevelopers & PractitionersBoosting LLM Performance with Tiered KV Cache on Google Kubernetes EngineBy Danna Wang • 7-minute readDevelopers & PractitionersAgent Factory Recap: Build AI Apps in Minutes with Google's Logan KilpatrickBy Mollie Pettit • 7-minute read