Engineering Autonomous Agents with Embabel and Spring

The “Hello, World” of Spring AI involves sending a prompt and receiving a text response. This is no longer enough for production. To build enterprise grade AI, we must move beyond simple request and response cycles toward autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex workflows. The challenge is doing this without losing the type safety, observability, and domain driven design that makes the Java ecosystem the backbone of enterprise software.

Join us for a three hour deep dive into Embabel, the new JVM framework from Rod Johnson designed for disciplined agentic AI. This workshop moves past the “if-else” mess of basic orchestration and introduces an architecture based on OODA loops and Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP).

Part 1: From Prompting to Planning (90 Minutes)
In the first half, we move from imperative logic to Goal Oriented orchestration. You will learn the core philosophy of Embabel and how it uses the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) to maintain stateful awareness. This module focuses heavily on DICE (Domain-Integrated Context Engineering) which allows you to move beyond simple RAG by injecting your existing Java domain models directly into the agent’s reasoning process. You will learn the planning mindset by defining clear goals rather than rigid paths, allowing the AI to navigate your business rules dynamically.

Part 2: Building the Digital Worker (90 Minutes)
The second half is a hands-on lab where we turn theory into a functioning agent. We will explore the process of turning your existing Spring Beans into AI Actions by defining preconditions and effects so that Embabel can construct plans without infinite loops. We will also address what happens when an LLM hallucinates or a tool fails. This includes exploring advanced patterns for error handling and plan repair to demonstrate why the JVM is the superior environment for mission critical AI.

By the end of this workshop, you will have built a functional Digital Worker capable of navigating a complex domain and interacting with real Spring managed services. You will leave with a local prototype and a blueprint for bringing agentic AI to your organization. Participants should have experience with Spring Boot and Java or Kotlin as well as a laptop with a JDK 17+ environment.

Stop just calling APIs and start building workers. This workshop provides a code heavy look at the future of Java backend development where systems do not just respond to requests but actively work to achieve goals.

About DaShaun Carter

DaShaun is a husband, father of four, volunteer, struggling athlete, former professional cheerleader, Raspberry Pi enthusiast, and Spring Developer Advocate at Broadcom. Deliberately practicing to build, run, and manage, better software, faster.

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