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  Agentic AI in 2026: From Chatbots to Autonomous Digital Colleagues – What Every Engineering Student Must Know Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology. 02 March 2026 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for nearly twenty years, I’ve rarely been as excited about a new development as I am about Agentic AI right now. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Multimodal AI — systems that can understand text, images, video and audio together. That was an important step forward. But Agentic AI feels like the next major leap. It is not just about understanding data anymore. It is about AI systems that can think, plan, reason, and act autonomously to achieve specific goals. Think of it this way: earlier AI was like a very smart assistant waiting for your instructions. Agentic AI is more like an autonomous teammate. It can break down a complex goal into smaller steps, make decisions on its own, use different tools, learn from the result...

  Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology, 26 February 2026 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for nearly twenty years in a Delhi engineering college, I’ve seen several technology waves come and go — from cloud computing to big data to basic machine learning. But the shift happening right now with multimodal AI feels different. It is not just another tool; it is fundamentally changing how machines perceive and interact with the world, much like humans do. For a long time, most AI models were unimodal — they handled one type of data at a time. A language model worked only with text, an image recognition system dealt only with pictures, and a speech model processed only audio. In 2026, we are moving rapidly into the era of multimodal AI , where a single model can understand and reason across text, images, video, audio, and even 3D data simultaneously. Think of it this way: instead of asking a model “What is in this photo?” or “...

Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 29 December 2025 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for nearly twenty years, I often tell my students that the most powerful use of technology is not always the most complex one. Sometimes the real magic happens when technology is combined with active citizen participation. Just a few days ago, on 24–25 December 2025, ADG Ramit Sharma held a major zonal workshop at Police Lines Bareilly for digital volunteers from all nine districts of the Bareilly Zone. The enthusiasm and commitment shown by the volunteers during this meeting once again highlighted how effective this initiative has become in tackling misinformation and maintaining public order. Ramit Sharma is the brainchild of the entire Digital Volunteers Initiative . It all started in 2015 when, as DIG Meerut Range, he began reaching out to influential people on social media — bloggers, student leaders and active Facebook group admins — and...

Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 10 March 2024 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for over twenty years in engineering colleges in Delhi, I’ve seen plenty of buzzwords come and go. But edge computing is one idea that genuinely feels important right now. I’ve been spending more time on it in my lectures this semester because it changes how we think about data and processing in a very practical way. For years we got used to the idea that all heavy computing happens in big central cloud data centres far away. You collect data from phones, sensors or machines, send it over the internet, wait for the cloud to process it, and then get the answer back. It worked fine when things weren’t time-critical. But by 2023, with millions of connected devices generating data every second, that round-trip delay started becoming a real problem. Edge computing simply moves the processing closer to the place where the data is actually created — on th...

Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 18 May 2023 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for over twenty years in engineering colleges in Delhi, I’ve seen many trends come and go. But few shifts have been as fundamental as the move to multicore processors . That is why I have been spending extra time on this topic with my final-year students this semester. For decades, the speed of a computer was measured mainly by its clock frequency — higher megahertz or gigahertz meant faster performance. Then, around the mid-2000s, chip makers hit a wall. Increasing clock speeds further was making processors too hot and too power-hungry. The solution that changed everything was simple yet powerful: instead of one super-fast core, put multiple cores on the same chip and let them work together. A multicore processor is exactly what the name suggests — a single physical chip that contains two or more independent processing units (cores). By 2023, it is ...

Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 12 September 2022 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for over twenty years, I keep telling my students that raw speed isn’t always about buying a faster machine. Sometimes the biggest gains come from simply making the code we already have run smarter. That’s what performance optimization is all about, and it’s become one of my favourite topics in class lately. At its heart, optimization means making software faster, lighter, and more efficient without throwing extra hardware at the problem. In my lectures we start with the basics — choosing the right algorithm, cutting unnecessary loops, and using proper data structures. A classic example I show every year is how switching from a nested loop search to a hash table can turn a sluggish program into something that feels instant. Last semester we took a small web application one batch had built and spent just two lab sessions cleaning it up. We added...