ZEO ITAM · Autumn 2026
This is the actual course Rod teaches live at ITAM in Autumn 2026, published lesson by lesson as the 17-week semester runs, two classes every week. The subject is the Zero-Employee Organization (ZEO): what changes when a business can hand real, bounded work to an AI agent instead of a person, how to tell a workflow that survives production from one that only impressed a demo, and how to measure the difference honestly instead of taking anyone's word for it — starting with your own. You build a real minutes baseline before touching any agent, build one from scratch to strip away the mystery, then exercise the whole discipline on a real (fictional) business with seeded errors a naive brief misses and a properly harnessed one catches. Unlike this site's other courses, this one is not finished — it grows in step with the live class, so expect new lessons most weeks through December.
SerialA live Autumn 2026 teaching run. It grows as the term runs; it is not evergreen.
Rod Rivera
Professor of the Practice, ITAM
Desk
First lesson is free to preview.
What You'll Learn
- Why agentic work is arriving at scale now, not as a future prediction
- The semester's running structure — your own business as the case study you instrument all term
- How to take a real, honest baseline of a manual workflow before you change anything about it
- The habit of measuring in minutes, not vibes, before claiming any workflow got faster
- What an AI agent actually is, mechanically, and how to brief one like a work order instead of an incantation
- Why Claude Code's .claude/ directory, not any single conversation, is where a real organization actually lives
- How to tell whether an agent harness is catching real errors or just producing confident, unverified answers
Prerequisites
- No programming experience required for Class 1
- Access to one real, recurring manual workflow in your own work to use as the semester's case study
- Enrolled or auditing the live ITAM Autumn 2026 course helps but is not required to follow the lessons
Syllabus
Ready to keep going?
The lessons in ZEO ITAM · Autumn 2026 are open. The Prof Rod weekly lesson is the next thing, not a door.
