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Week 2 | APA Developer Track: AI Skills and Effective Prompting


Lu.Hunnicutt
Pathfinder Community Team
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Welcome to Week 2 of your APA Training Camp Developer track. This week, you will focus on building familiarity with skills used by AI Agents. These skills are important to learn so you can effectively build agentic solutions that solve real business problems.
 

At the end of this week, you’ll be HALFWAY through APA Training Camp. To celebrate the halfway mark, if you complete weeks 1 and 2 by Sunday, April 20th, you will receive the APA Training Camp Pacesetter Badge

 

 

 

Step 1: Complete Your Week 2 Courses


The theme for week 2 is all about AI skills. These courses should take approximately 1 and a half hours to complete. 

  1. Crafting Effective Prompts with Costar Framework
  2. Classifying Data with AI Agents
  3. Analyzing Sentiment with AI Agents
  4. Extracting Named Entities with Generative AI
  5. Testing AI Accuracy with F1 Scores
  6. Transforming Data with AI Agents
     

If you haven’t already, click “Start now” for the APA Developer Masterclass. This ensures you’ll get your certificate after completing all the courses. However, it does require you to finish all of Week 1’s courses before continuing on to Week 2.

 

Step 2: Use the Discussion Guide to create a Development Plan


This week’s activities will help you identify where your team has skill gaps and help you create a plan to address them. Schedule a meeting with your automation team, and ask everyone to complete their self assessment prior to the meeting. Use the discussion guide to facilitate a conversation around the competency matrix and then create an upskilling action plan.

  1. Review this week’s Discussion Guide on Building Team Expertise for Agentic Process Automation
  2. Then, complete the Self Assessment of your current skills
  3. Next, as a team, complete the Competency Matrix
  4. Finally, build out your Upskilling Action Plan

For ease of review, we created an xlsx that includes the Competency Matrix and the Upskilling Action Plan on different tabs.

 

Step 3: Join Office Hours to Get Support and Ask Questions 


Join the office hours that work best for your schedule, but please note these are NOT mandatory and simply designed to hep you get the most from the training experience. Joining will give you access to our experts so you can ask specific questions and receive tailored guidance that addresses your unique challenges.


Step 4: Join Our LIVE Coaching Session


Mark your calendars for this week’s LIVE coaching session scheduled on Thursday, April 17th at 10:30am EDT / 8:00pm IST. If this time doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, it is NOT mandatory to attend and will be immediately available for replay. In Week 2, we focused on learning new skills required for agentic process automation, from your own team’s talent to the skills that AI can take on. Join @Matt.Stewart and @Philipkk as they run through the talent-based activities from week 2 and give you a sneak peek at what’s coming in week 3.

The developer track focuses on learning the key skills that AI agents can do effectively and how to craft excellent prompts with the Costar Framework.

Did you miss last week’s Live Coaching Session!? No worries! You can check out the recording here.


Step 5: Take Part in Our Discussion Series to Win Swag


Each Thursday, we’ll post a discussion prompt asking everyone a question about something related to the courses. Make sure you head over and leave a comment because when you post, you’ll receive an entry into our Swag Sweepstake Drawing. We’ll announce the winners for that week in the next Live Coaching Session. 

We can’t wait to see you all this week during the live sessions. Until then, I have one question for you — 

What was a big “aha” moment you had while going through last week’s content? Drop your comments below ⬇️

 

Did this topic help answer your question?

Vatsy
Pathfinder Advocate | Tier 6
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  • Pathfinder Advocate | Tier 6
  • April 12, 2025

Week 2 started already! Woohoo! 😊


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COSTAR framework is insightful.


saqib 4856
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  • Navigator | Tier 3
  • April 14, 2025

Excited to dive into Week 2!


saqib 4856
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  • Navigator | Tier 3
  • April 14, 2025

One of the main "aha!"💡 moments for me during Week 1 was to understand that APA is not only about putting AI into automation, but it's about making automation act more like a co-worker than a legacy bot. The idea of Agentic Automation really flips the thought from rule-based execution to intelligent, goal-seeking systems that can learn, decide, and even cooperate.

Also, becoming familiar with the APA Enablement Framework taught me how to architect transformation in a scalable and effective manner. Can't wait to put this kind of thinking to work as we evaluate our present automation landscape!

Thanks a ton for the amazing Week 1 content, ​@Lu.Hunnicutt  and team! 🙌 Looking forward to what’s coming next!


Anjali.K1
Cadet | Tier 2
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  • Cadet | Tier 2
  • April 14, 2025

Can anyone please help me with Caption settings for below training.

Analyzing Sentiment with AI Agents. (Week 2)

Analyzing Sentiment with AI Agents

I am not able to relate the caption and Audio.

 


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  • Navigator | Tier 3
  • April 14, 2025

i did my courses last week why is that not saved, when i now go to my learning phath its says still to do fr last week 

 


Marc Mueller
Pathfinder Advocate | Tier 6
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  • Pathfinder Advocate | Tier 6
  • April 14, 2025

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COSTAR really changed the way I think about AI prompts! Super interesting and worthy! I will for sure be using it!! :)


Oli.Morris
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 14, 2025

Keep on squeezing, folks!


Julio Cesar.R
Cadet | Tier 2
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👉🏼The "COSTAR" guide sounds very interesting. Let's dive into week 2. It looks like we're starting the practical application. Yay!

👉🏼La guía "COSTAR" suena muy interesante. Vamos por la semana 2. Parece que empieza la puesta en práctica. ¡Yujuu!


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  • Cadet | Tier 2
  • April 14, 2025

Week 2: Sentiment - when running the Sentiment process, all of my results show “Neutral” no matter which row number I select.  Where should I check to correct this?

 

Never mind - this is working as expected now.  


AndyF
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  • Navigator | Tier 3
  • April 14, 2025

Anyone else having issues with the Classification demo not working and failing with on the Classification Input task bot with the following error

 

 Run JavaScript action is supported only for web applications or Chromium Embedded Framework applications. Please change the application type and try again

 

I am using Chrome and the webpage appears, but nothing gets inserted and it just errors with the message above.  Confirmed the agent addin is running and enabled in Chrome.

 

The issue is only with the Classification, all other tasks work and run correctly.

 

Any help or ideas??

 

Really enjoying the CoSTAR framework, seems better then one I have had shared previusly (GCSE - Mastering Prompt Crafting for AI Models: The GCSE Approach).  One that I will definatly move to.


zaid.chougle
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Started with an eye opener with COSTAR!😎


KhaledMostafaMe
Most Valuable Pathfinder
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COSTAR framework really helpful getting more accurate data from GenAI ! 


madhu subbegowda
Most Valuable Pathfinder
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Can someone help me with this please! I am not sure why it says access denied to me. I am unable to do any hands-on.

 


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I have a query. So far, all the examples explained to us are based on the CoSTAR framework. From what I understand, the same things can be achieved using Gen AI, and I believe we are already using Gen AI through model connection.

In that case, where does Agentic AI come into the picture? It would be helpful if someone could explain this


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  • Cadet | Tier 2
  • April 15, 2025

When trying to get an answer in AI Skill Classification, I get the following error message

 


Matt.Stewart
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 15, 2025
madhu subbegowda wrote:

Can someone help me with this please! I am not sure why it says access denied to me. I am unable to do any hands-on.

 

@madhu subbegowda 

 

Are you logged in with your APATC2025 credentials?  Any other control room credentials you have do not have the necessary access to the API Key credentials.


madhu subbegowda
Most Valuable Pathfinder
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Hi ​@Matt.Stewart i was using my mvp credentials hence it didn't allow me. Oli shared me the right credentials and the issue is resolved now.


Matt.Stewart
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 15, 2025
RajeshS106234 wrote:

I have a query. So far, all the examples explained to us are based on the CoSTAR framework. From what I understand, the same things can be achieved using Gen AI, and I believe we are already using Gen AI through model connection.

In that case, where does Agentic AI come into the picture? It would be helpful if someone could explain this

This will become clear in week 4, but I’ll share some more details here for you and others.

The model connection lets the Automation Anywhere control room pass information to a Large Language Model.  The COSTAR formatted prompt you are writing is guiding a generative AI process to solve a specific problem.  In week 2 those problems are things like Classification, Extraction, etc. These independent problem solving prompts are “tools” to be used by an agent.

In week 4 you’ll take all of the capabilities and combine them together to build a fully autonomous agent.  Keep working on the tools for now, and by the end of week 4 you’ll see how it all comes together!


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Anjali.K1 wrote:

Can anyone please help me with Caption settings for below training.

Analyzing Sentiment with AI Agents. (Week 2)

Analyzing Sentiment with AI Agents

I am not able to relate the caption and Audio.

 

Its fixed now


Matt.Stewart
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 15, 2025
jdtamayo wrote:

When trying to get an answer in AI Skill Classification, I get the following error message

 

Hey ​@jdtamayo , looks like you have all the necessary permissions.  Could you give it another try and let me know?


Matt.Stewart
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 15, 2025
AndyF wrote:

Anyone else having issues with the Classification demo not working and failing with on the Classification Input task bot with the following error

 

 Run JavaScript action is supported only for web applications or Chromium Embedded Framework applications. Please change the application type and try again

 

I am using Chrome and the webpage appears, but nothing gets inserted and it just errors with the message above.  Confirmed the agent addin is running and enabled in Chrome.

 

The issue is only with the Classification, all other tasks work and run correctly.

 

Any help or ideas??

 

Really enjoying the CoSTAR framework, seems better then one I have had shared previusly (GCSE - Mastering Prompt Crafting for AI Models: The GCSE Approach).  One that I will definatly move to.

@AndyF Try downloading the asset pack again and giving it another try.  We made a small correction that was impacting some people, and you might have been one of them.


Forum|alt.badge.img+1
  • Cadet | Tier 2
  • April 15, 2025
Matt.Stewart wrote:
jdtamayo wrote:

When trying to get an answer in AI Skill Classification, I get the following error message

 

Hey ​@jdtamayo , looks like you have all the necessary permissions.  Could you give it another try and let me know?

Hey ​@Matt.Stewart, I tried again and got the same message error

 


Matt.Stewart
Automation Anywhere Team
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  • Automation Anywhere Team
  • April 15, 2025
jdtamayo wrote:
Matt.Stewart wrote:
jdtamayo wrote:

When trying to get an answer in AI Skill Classification, I get the following error message

 

Hey ​@jdtamayo , looks like you have all the necessary permissions.  Could you give it another try and let me know?

Hey ​@Matt.Stewart, I tried again and got the same message error

 

@jdtamayo 

What model connect is showing as selected at the top in “Model Connection”?  Can you screenshot that for me?


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