Event FinderAI Talks with Tea&Coffee #55: The Agent Harness: Testing and Governing AI Agents Before They Reach Production
- Starts
- Ends
- Format
- In person
- Location
- Nashua Library, 2 Court St, Nashua, NH 03060
About This Event
Abstract An agent that produces a wrong answer is inconvenient. An agent that acts on it is an incident. This session shows how to make sure it’s the former. We rigorously test software before it reaches production. Yet many organizations deploy AI agents that can write to CRM systems, trigger workflows, generate regulated content, or make customer-facing decisions after little more than prompt experimentation and manual review. That approach does not scale. An agent that produces an incorrect answer is inconvenient. An agent that takes action based on an incorrect answer can create operational, compliance, financial, and reputational risk. The solution is not better prompting alone. It is establishing a robust agent harness that governs how every agent operates. Drawing from enterprise AI and data platform implementation experience, this session introduces a practical framework for testing, evaluating, and governing AI agents before they interact with real users or production systems. We will explore golden test sets, automated regression testing, policy-based controls, and human-in-the-loop review models. Underpinning all of it is risk-tiering: aligning the depth of each control to the level of autonomy an agent actually has. Attendees will learn how to detect and prevent common failure modes including hallucinated tool calls, stale-context decisions, guardrail drift, policy violations, and hidden performance regressions. The session concludes with a practical checklist for defining what “production-ready” means for an AI agent and how to balance innovation with appropriate governance.