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How to Evaluate an AI Agent: 8-Question Checklist (2026) | Viktor Blog
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Key Takeaways “The honest evaluation is what happens when the prompt is messy, the data is bad, or the action fails halfway.” The eight questions below are the ones that separate real products from chat wrappers. If a vendor cannot answer them clearly, walk away.
Key Takeaways “They show the happy path with one perfectly worded prompt.” The eight questions below are the ones that separate real products from chat wrappers. If a vendor cannot answer them clearly, walk away.
The eight questions below are the ones that separate real products from chat wrappers. If a vendor cannot answer them clearly, walk away. “Security and audit matter more than features.” Pricing models tell you what the vendor optimizes for. Per-seat pricing rewards inactive seats. Per-action pricing rewards your usage.
The eight questions below are the ones that separate real products from chat wrappers. If a vendor cannot answer them clearly, walk away. “A tool you cannot trust with your CRM is not actually a tool you can use, no matter how good its outputs look.” Pricing models tell you what the vendor optimizes for. Per-seat pricing rewards inactive seats. Per-action pricing rewards your usage.
Most AI agent demos lie by omission. They show the happy path with one perfectly worded prompt. The honest evaluation is what happens when the prompt is messy, the data is bad, or the action fails halfway. “If a vendor cannot answer them clearly, walk away.” Security and audit matter more than features. A tool you cannot trust with your CRM is not actually a tool you can use, no matter how good its outputs look.
A good agent shows you what it will do before it does it. You see the draft email, the proposed campaign change, the new GitHub branch, before any of those things go live. You approve, edit, or reject. “Three weeks in, someone will discover that an agent paused the wrong campaign, or sent the wrong email to the wrong customer, or merged the wrong PR.” Ask: "Show me what a customer reply looks like before it goes out." The answer should be a draft you can approve. If the answer is "it just sends," walk away unless you only plan to use it for low-stakes notifications.
Vendors love big integration numbers. The numbers are often misleading. “The right way to evaluate: pick the three tools you actually need to connect, and ask the vendor to do a specific workflow in each one.” If the vendor cannot run a request that touches three tools and creates one new artifact, the integrations are likely surface-level: read-only data exports, not real action surfaces.