Building an Evaluation Harness for Production AI Agents: A 12-Metric Framework From 100+ Deployments

# How Companies Actually Know If Their AI Assistants Are Working Companies deploying AI agents at scale have discovered that you need to measure 12 specific things to know whether your AI is actually helping—things like whether it finds the right information, generates useful responses, and behaves reliably in the real world. This framework comes from lessons learned across more than 100 real business deployments, so it reflects what actually matters in practice rather than academic theory. If your organization is using or considering AI agents, these metrics help you move past vague feelings about performance and get concrete answers about what's working and what needs fixing.