OpenAI + @Temporalio : Building Durable, Production Ready Agents - Cornelia Davis, Temporal

2026-01-12 · Source: AI Engineer · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Software Development & Engineering, Cloud Computing & IT Infrastructure · Depth: Advanced, extended

Summary

Cornelia Davis, a Developer Advocate at Temporal, discusses the integration of OpenAI's Agents SDK with Temporal for building durable, production-ready AI agents. The presentation highlights how Temporal, an open-source distributed systems backing service, provides durability, retries, and state management for agentic applications, preventing data loss and token re-burning in case of application crashes or network failures. She demonstrates how to wrap OpenAI API calls and tool invocations as Temporal activities and orchestrate them within workflows, enabling agents to pick up exactly where they left off after interruptions. The integration leverages a public API, "activity as tool," to convert Temporal activities into LLM-consumable tool descriptions and includes a plugin for the Agents SDK to utilize Temporal's durability features for LLM calls themselves. This approach allows developers to focus on business logic rather than complex error handling in distributed AI systems.

Key takeaway

For AI Engineers building production-grade agentic applications, integrating Temporal with the OpenAI Agents SDK is crucial. This combination allows your agents to withstand crashes and network issues without losing state or re-executing costly LLM calls, significantly reducing operational overhead and accelerating development by abstracting complex distributed systems challenges. Explore the provided AI cookbook and Python SDK for practical implementation examples.

Key insights

Temporal integrates with OpenAI's Agents SDK to provide durability and resilience for AI agents in distributed systems.

Principles

• Program the happy path, let Temporal handle failures.
• Microagents enhance scalability and maintainability.
• Logical processes abstract physical execution.

Method

Wrap agent tools and LLM calls as Temporal activities within a workflow. Configure the OpenAI Agents SDK with the Temporal plugin to enable durability and state management for agentic loops.

In practice

• Use Temporal activities for external API calls and heavy computation.
• Implement agent handoffs using separate agents or context switching.
• Leverage Temporal's UI for visibility into agent execution history.

Topics

• OpenAI Agents SDK
• Temporal Platform
• AI Agent Durability
• Distributed Systems
• LLM Orchestration

Best for: AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, MLOps Engineer

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