Introduction#
AI agents go beyond simple chat interfaces. An agentic workflow lets a language model autonomously decide which tools to call, chain multiple actions together, and reason about complex tasks. The key enabler is function calling (also called tool use), where the model outputs structured JSON that maps to executable functions in your code.
This tutorial shows you how to build a practical agent that can look up weather data, search the web, and perform calculations — all within a single conversational loop using OpenAI’s function calling API.