Welcome to What’s New on the Gradient Platform—your weekly roundup of the latest updates for the DigitalOcean Gradient Platform. Each week, we’ll share new feature releases, technical tutorials, or video walkthroughs to help you stay ahead of the curve and keep building. Check back regularly for new insights and inspiration, or get started now: build an agent or call a model with serverless inference.

Week of July 28th

Product Update Add Dropbox folders as a data source

On Gradient Platform, you can now add a Dropbox folder as a data source to your knowledge bases. This allows you to index and use files stored in your Dropbox account within your knowledge base.

Week of July 21st

Product Update Log Stream Insights on Gradient Platform

DigitalOcean GradientAI is a unified AI cloud platform that combines GPU infrastructure, intelligent agent development, and prebuilt applications to help developers seamlessly build, deploy, and scale AI solutions from prototype to production.

Product Update Gradient Platform SDK Now Available in Public Preview

The official DigitalOcean Platform SDK is now in Public Preview. You can use the SDK to manage Gradient Platform resources, including knowledge bases and generative AI agents, from Python applications.

Week of July 7th

Product Update Introducing DigitalOcean GradientAI

DigitalOcean GradientAI is a unified AI cloud platform that combines GPU infrastructure, intelligent agent development, and prebuilt applications to help developers seamlessly build, deploy, and scale AI solutions from prototype to production.

Product Update GradientAI Platform is now GA

DigitalOcean’s GradientAI Platform is now generally available, offering developers a fully managed environment to build, scale, and deploy AI-powered applications and agents—complete with integrated tools for data integration, evaluation, observability, and serverless access to top LLMs—all without managing infrastructure.

Tutorial How I built a smart travel app using the GradientAI Platform

This tutorial shows how to build an AI-powered travel app called Nomado using DigitalOcean’s GradientAI Platform. It walks through using serverless inference to generate personalized itineraries, function routing for real-time flight info, and agent routing to power a chatbot for accommodation and cultural tips—all without managing infrastructure.

Tutorial Using DigitalOcean’s Serverless Inference (and Agents) with the OpenAI SDK

This tutorial shows how to use the OpenAI SDK with DigitalOcean’s Serverless Inference and Agents by simply changing the base URL—letting you run powerful LLMs or connect them to your own data without rewriting code, while supporting streaming, retrieval metadata, and seamless backend swapping.

Week of June 30th

Product Update Agent Traceability and Conversation Logs are now available

Agent traceability: New debugging tools show you how each request flows through your agent, including routing decisions, token counts, and system messages. This helps you pinpoint issues, improve accuracy, and optimize performance in production.

Customer conversation logs: Capture and store agent interactions across your app, playground, or widget. With role-based access controls (RBAC) and data retention controls, you can export and analyze logs for analyzing user behavior, training better agents, or supporting audit and compliance needs.

Week of June 17th

Webinar Recording Integrate AI with Serverless Inference on DigitalOcean

Watch this recorded session to learn how DigitalOcean’s serverless inference makes it easy to integrate AI into your app—no setup, no idle costs, and auto-scaling included. You’ll see real-world demos using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and more, all accessible through a single API.

Week of June 9th

Product Update Introducing Serverless Inference on the GenAI Platform

Serverless inference is now available on the GenAI Platform, allowing you to get direct responses from foundation models without creating an agent. A single API endpoint provides access to hosted models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others. You can authenticate requests with model access keys, which provide secure access to all available models.

Tutorial Serverless Inference with the DigitalOcean GradientAI Platform

This tutorial walks you through how to set up and run serverless inference on the DigitalOcean GradientAI Platform using the API or Cloud Console, showing how to generate text with a pre-trained model in Python and highlighting real-world use cases like event-driven apps, scalable backends, and data processing.

Week of May 19th

Tutorial Effective Strategies for Sending Data to AI Agents

This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to preparing, formatting, and transmitting data to GenAI agents, covering best practices for handling structured and unstructured inputs, managing large datasets, enabling real-time streaming, and optimizing performance to ensure efficient, scalable AI integration with platforms like GradientAI Platform.

Week of May 5th

Tutorial Knowledge Base Citations, Agent Versioning, and Insights on the GradientAI Platform

This tutorial shows you how to use new GradientAI Platform features—Knowledge Base Citations, Agent Versioning, and Agent Insights—to build more transparent, trackable, and cost-aware AI agents, with step-by-step guidance on setting up a knowledge base, tracing model outputs, managing agent iterations, and monitoring usage at scale.

Week of April 28th

Product Update New: Agent Versioning, Agent Insights, and Knowledge Base Citations

DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform now supports enhanced agent development with agent insights, agent versioning, and knowledge base citations. These updates make it easier than ever to build transparent, auditable, and high-performance AI agents for real-world applications.

Week of April 21st

Product Update Improvements to our Agent Studio

We’ve improved the Agent Playground and agent API experience. You can now see the knowledge bases, functions, and guardrails that is used by your GenAI Platform agent to generate a response.

Product Update Runtime Logs

You can now view the runtime logs for your agents on GenAI Platform. The logs display the events that occur during an agent’s execution, such as the knowledge bases and functions accessed to generate a response.

Product Update GradientAI Platform Agent Templates

You can now create GradientAI Platform agents from templates. Templates have predefined agent instructions and foundation models that allow you to quickly create an agent for certain use cases.

Tutorial Optimizing OpenAI’s GPT with GradientAI Platform

This tutorial walks you through how to use DigitalOcean’s GradientAI Platform to build an AI agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o or GPT-4o mini, showing step-by-step how to set up a knowledge base, integrate your data with RAG, and deploy a reasoning-capable agent using your own OpenAI API key.

Week of April 14th

Product Update Smarter Knowledge Bases for Smarter AI Agents

Now available on DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform: enhanced knowledge base features including web crawling, custom crawl rules, and one-click reindexing, making it easier to keep your AI agents up to date with real-time, context-rich information.

Product Update Claude Sonnet 3.7 Model now available on the GenAI Platform

Claude Sonnet 3.7 is now live on the GenAI Platform. Check out the available models page for details and usage info.

Webinar Recording Sail to Success: GenAI Platform Knowledge Base Best Practices

Hear from experts at DigitalOcean and Vijil about building a powerful Knowledge Base for AI agents. Learn to integrate documentation, FAQs, and custom data, tackle common challenges, and apply best practices. Discover how new features like web crawling and faster indexing can enhance performance. Whether you’re starting or optimizing your AI workflow, this session will equip you with the insights and tools to maximize GenAI’s potential.

Week of April 7th

Product Update Expanding the GenAI Platform: Now supporting OpenAI models

DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform now supports OpenAI models, allowing users to integrate GPT-4o, o1, and o3-mini into their AI agents using their own OpenAI API keys. This update provides greater flexibility for building AI applications with OpenAI’s advanced models, offering users the ability to test and deploy models in production seamlessly.

Tutorial Building a Slack AI Chatbot with DigitalOcean GenAI Platform

?In this tutorial, learn how to build a Slack AI chatbot using DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform to automate team interactions, such as summarizing conversations, answering questions, and responding to mentions or direct messages, by integrating large language models directly into your Slack workspace.

Tutorial Build an AI Agent to Automate Document Analysis with GenAI

This tutorial demonstrates how to create an AI agent using the GenAI Platform to automate the analysis of security questionnaires, including setting up a private API endpoint, developing a Streamlit application to process Excel files, and deploying the solution on DigitalOcean’s App Platform.

Week of March 31st

Tutorial Build Real-Time AI Agents with GenAI and Serverless Functions

This tutorial demonstrates how to build real-time AI agents on DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform by integrating serverless functions, enabling dynamic data retrieval and processing.

Video Build an AI Agent to Automate Security Questionnaires

Sick of answering the same security and compliance questions over and over? In this video, learn how you can build a practical AI-powered app that analyzes your company’s compliance documents and responds to vendor questionnaires using Generative AI and RAG.

Week of March 24th

Product Update Improved Web Crawling for Knowledge Bases

The limit of URLs that can be crawled by the GenAI web crawler for data sources has no been increased from 1,000 to 5,500.

Tutorial Beyond Vectors - Knowledge Graphs & RAG Using GenAI

This tutorial demonstrates how to enhance Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems by integrating knowledge graphs, enabling AI models to understand complex relationships within data for more accurate responses.

Week of March 17th

Tutorial Building an AI Article Reviewer using GenAI Platform and GitHub

?This tutorial demonstrates how to create an AI article reviewer by integrating DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform with GitHub Actions, enabling automated, style-consistent code reviews.

Tutorial Building Real-Time Kubernetes AI Agent with GenAI Platform

In this article, explore how to build a real-time AI agent for Kubernetes using DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform, enabling automated generation, validation, and troubleshooting of Kubernetes manifests.

Tutorial DeepSeek-R1 vs. Llama 3.3 (70B): AI Chatbot on GenAI

?This tutorial compares the DeepSeek-R1 and Llama 3.3 (70B) AI chatbots deployed on DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform, evaluating their performance on startup-related queries to help you choose the best model for your needs.

Video GenAI Platform: Using Function Calling to retrieve real-time data

One of the biggest challenges with AI models is their lack of access to real-time data from external sources. But what if you could create an AI-powered agent that connects to APIs for up-to-date answers? Watch the demo to see how simple it is to integrate external data into your AI applications.

Week of March 10th

Tutorial Build an AI Agent or Chatbot with GenAI Platform Integration

The guide provides you with step-by-step instructions on creating a customizable AI agent or chatbot using DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform, covering model selection, knowledge base integration, and deployment.

Week of February 24th

Product Update Web Crawling for Knowledge Bases

You can now add a website as a data source for your GenAI knowledge bases. Providing a seed URL and a scope allows GenAI to crawl the website for information, index it, and use it to train your agent models.

Product Update Sensitive Data Detection for Guardrails

With sensitive data detection guardrails, the agent automatically identifies and anonymizes sensitive data—such as credit card numbers, personal identifiable information, and location data—with fully customizable category settings.

Week of February 17th

Tutorial How to Deploy DeepSeek R1 on DigitalOcean

This article outlines three ways you can deploy the DeepSeek R1 LLM on DigitalOcean—via GenAI Platform, Hugging Face integration, or GPU Droplets with Ollama.

Tutorial Getting Started with the GenAI Platform

Want to get started with AI on DigitalOcean? This guide walks you through using the GenAI Platform to create a knowledge base, add guardrails, and deploy your own AI agents.

Week of February 10th

Product Update Anthropic and DeepSeek Join the GenAI Platform Model Library

DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform now supports Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek R1 models, giving you more powerful, flexible options for building AI agents—ideal for everything from real-time chat to complex problem-solving. With serverless model hosting, easy integration, and pay-as-you-go pricing, you can deploy advanced AI applications without worrying about infrastructure. Try the new models ->

Video Building a Market Research Assistant with GenAI Platform, DeepSeek R1, and CrewAI

In this video, learn how you can build a Market Research Assistant using powerful tools like DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform, DeepSeek R1, and CrewAI.

Week of February 3rd

Video Building a Multi-Agent Chatbot with Function Routing on GradientAI Platform

In this demo, learn how to build a multi-agent chatbot solution on the GradientAI Platform using function routing.

Week of January 27th

Product Update Introducing the GradientAI Platform: Simplifying AI Development for All

DigitalOcean’s GradientAI Platform is an all-in-one solution that enables you to quickly build and scale AI agents, leveraging advanced Generative AI models from providers like Meta and Mistral AI. Designed for both seasoned developers and newcomers, the new platform offers features such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), function routing, agent customization, and guardrails to facilitate the creation of secure, context-aware applications. ?Build an agent ->

Product Update Knowledge Base Improvements

You can now add files from your local storage as a data source to your knowledge base.

Tutorial The Secret Sauce to a Winning Dataset for GradientAI - Quality Over Quantity

This article highlights the importance of prioritizing data quality over quantity when building datasets for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications, offering insights into best practices for gathering and evaluating data sources.

Tutorial From Knowledge Gaps to Expert Agents - Unlocking the Advanced Use Cases of RAG with the DigitalOcean GenAI Platform

This article dives into the advanced features of DigitalOcean’s GradientAI Platform, specifically Function Calling and Routing Multiple Agents, demonstrating how these capabilities enable developers to create customized, scalable AI systems by integrating external functions and managing specialized agents for complex tasks.

Previous tutorials

• Tutorial Adding a Chatbot to Your Ghost Website Using DigitalOcean GradientAI Platform
• Video GradientAI Platform Function Routing
• Video Add a DigitalOcean GradientAI Platform Chatbot to Your Joomla Website
• Tutorial Adding a Chatbot to Your Joomla Website Using DigitalOcean GradientAI Platform
• Video How to Add a GradientAI Platform Chatbot to Your Concrete5 Website
• TutorialAdding a GradientAI Platform chatbot to Concrete5 Website