A demo can make an agent look brilliant. Production makes it answer messy tickets, browse broken pages, call tools in the wrong order, and recover from unclear user intent.
That is where many teams get surprised. They test the final answer, but not the workflow that produced it.
An AI agent evaluation harness is a repeatable test system for real agent work. It runs realistic tasks, captures every step, scores the outcome, checks cost and latency, and turns failures into regression tests. If you build copilots, support agents, data agents, browser agents, coding agents, or internal automation, this is the difference between "it worked in the demo" and "we know when it is safe to ship."
This is vendor-neutral. No product pitch. Just a practical pattern you can build into your workflow.
Why agent evaluation matters now
