Trust & lifecycle plane / Tier 1 / Phase 1
Evaluation & Assurance
Was it good, safe and compliant?
Grade the system at five scopes, prove reliability across repeated runs, red-team it adversarially, and gate every promotion on the evidence.
01 / WHAT THIS BOUNDARY OWNS
- Five evaluation scopes: component, agent, multi-agent trajectory, system, and trust
- Trace-based grading — LLM-as-judge with calibration, agent-as-a-judge over the trajectory, human grading
- N-run reliability: median, variance and cost-adjusted completion across repeated runs
- Regression suites built from production incidents
- Adversarial and red-team testing, including injection and harmful-action benchmarks
- Shadow and canary evaluation before promotion
- Simulation of users and environments for rehearsal at scale
02 / INTEGRATION POINTS
15
Observability & FinOps
14traces supply the evaluation cases
Governance, Oversight & AgentOps
02evidence for the release gate
Model & Inference
07model regression on change
Retrieval & Context Engineering
11groundedness and retrieval quality
Tool, Skill & Sandbox
13tool contract testing
Security, Safety & Guardrails
attack success rate
03 / ENTERPRISE ACCOUNTABILITY
Quality / AI Assurance, with the Security red team
- Head of Quality or AI Assurance — accountable owner
- Evaluation engineer — harnesses, datasets, judges
- QA lead — regression discipline and release criteria
- Red teamer — adversarial campaigns
- Domain expert grader — the ground truth for quality
- Data scientist — judge calibration and statistics
Architectural recommendation, not a research finding.
04 / WHAT DONE LOOKS LIKE
Pilot needs a golden set and a regression suite fed by real incidents. Adversarial campaigns arrive with production; simulated users and environments are the phase 3 workstream for rehearsing at scale.
Signals to watch
- Pass rate by evaluation scope
- Variance across N runs, not just the median
- Cost-adjusted completion rate
- Attack success rate with the harness and judge configuration attached
- Judge-to-human agreement (kappa) on a sampled set
- Share of production incidents converted into regression cases
05 / FAILURE MODES
- Single-run scores treated as evidence: a good demo says almost nothing about production
- Evaluation awareness — a system that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested, inflating measured safety
- Uncalibrated LLM judges disagreeing with humans in exactly the cases that matter
- Benchmark contamination and overfitting to public sets
- No domain expert in the loop, so plausible-but-wrong passes
06 / REFERENCE LANDSCAPE
Tool and standards snapshot · last reviewed approximately mid-2026
Open source
- RAGAS
- DeepEval
- promptfoo
- Inspect AI
- Giskard
- Langfuse or LangSmith evaluation
- Benchmarks: SWE-bench Pro, GAIA, TAU-bench, AgentBench
- Safety suites: AgentDojo, InjecAgent, AgentHarm
Managed
- Commercial evaluation and observability suites
- Third-party red-team and assurance services
Standards
- NIST AI RMF Measure function
- ISO/IEC 42001 performance evaluation clauses
- Documented judge configuration published alongside every score
ARCHITECTURE NOTE
A system can have an excellent model and still be a poor agent. Only trajectory-level and repeated-run evaluation surfaces that difference — and it is the difference between a pilot and a product.
