How to Evaluate an AI Assistant for Production Operations

Accuracy is not enough

An assistant can be accurate in a demo and still unsafe in production. Operational evaluation must measure evidence quality, uncertainty handling, permission behavior, and usefulness to engineers.

Build an evaluation set

Use historical incidents, repeated failures, ambiguous failures, and negative cases. Include examples where the correct answer is to ask for more context or escalate to a human.

Measure operational value

Useful metrics include diagnosis acceptance rate, time to first useful explanation, repeated incident deflection, escalation reduction, and engineer feedback quality.

Keep humans in the loop

For production operations, the assistant should recommend, explain, and prepare actions before it executes sensitive changes. Human review is part of the system design, not a failure of automation.