Agents for Everyone: A Workshop Framework for Building Agentic AI Capabilities in a Distributed Curation Community

Abstract

Agentic AI has the potential to accelerate curation of biological databases and knowledge bases. However, uptake has been hindered by a number of challenges and obstacles, including access to agents and appropriate training. Here we describe how we have attempted to address and mitigate these challenges and obstacles through the deployment of a cloud-based agentic environment, and the development of an interactive training workshop for the Gene Ontology Consortium. Our cloud environment for agentic-assisted curation was based on the JupyterHub platform, and utilized Claude Code as a universal harness. This allows curators to interact with an agent session through a terminal running in the browser, and has additional benefits such as centralization of access through a single API gateway, removing the need for participants to manage subscriptions or install software locally. We created four training modules, walking participants through basic agentic tool use first and then working up to agentic biological pathway curation using the existing GO-CAM (GO Causal Activity Model) curation tool. Thirty-seven participants took part in the four-hour workshop. Our key takeaway from this workshop is that building community capability with agentic AI is primarily a problem of access, workflow design, and training. Removing technical barriers, introducing capabilities gradually, grounding exercises in familiar curation tasks, and giving curators direct experience evaluating agent output can provide a practical route toward building shared agentic AI capability in distributed scientific communities.