Why offline agent evaluation frameworks fail in production, and what infrastructure separates agents that improve from those that plateau.
The Evaluation Debt You Don't Know You Have: Why Agent Evals Fail in Production
By Paul Twist, Berlin | July 13, 2026
The Problem Nobody Talks About
You've shipped an agent. It works great on your test suite. Three weeks later, your customers are hitting a failure mode you never saw coming.
This is evaluation debt. And 38% of AI teams say it's their primary blocker right now.
89% of teams running production AI agents have observability, but only 52% have evals. That gap is where agent quality dies — and…
AI agent evaluation has to keep running through traces, online evaluators, human review, datasets, and redeploy gates after…
Most production AI agents don't fail because the model is bad. They fail because the infrastructure...
The demo is impressive. ✅ The demo works in your environment, with your data, with you watching....
Most teams I talk to have "evals." I ask them where the evals run. The answer is almost always the...
The Core Problem You shipped an AI agent. It works in demos. Then it runs 10,000 times in...
