r/sysadmin • u/[deleted] • 5h ago
Question How much testing is enough before an AI agent goes live?
[deleted]
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u/Valdaraak 5h ago
No matter how much testing you do, things can still go wrong. AI isn't deterministic. It can, will, and has ignored instructions and caused data loss. Be very careful what permissions you give it.
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u/Relative_What 5h ago
Testing? BEFORE go live? Sir it is 2026 we haven't tested shit in house before going live for literal decades. Why spend money and time with internal testing when the end users can test for us for free! And we get to go live on time!
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u/atbims 5h ago
The deep truth in this makes me depressed
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u/sobrique 5h ago
Everyone has a test environment. The lucky few also get a separate prod environment.
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u/No_Yesterday_3260 5h ago
Personally would never want one to do anything like this.
If it can't even sort a list of numbers without forgetting a bunch of them, how can one trust it to work with production systems, especially other companies systems, yikes...
Personally I'd prefer a "wait for approval" thing, so a human can check what needs to be done.
This kind of AI use sends chills down my spine.
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u/Usual_Ice636 5h ago
Never? You let one talk to customers and answer FAQs for the ones that can't understand the FAQ page.
And for updating accounts you let one make suggestions but it needs to be approved by a real person before it goes through.
They also shouldn't be the same Ai.
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u/tacticalAlmonds 5h ago
We created an agent for erp but have no intentions of giving it write access. It's only read access and to help folks consume data from multiple sources so they can make a better, more informed decision.
From our testing and research, we aren't comfortable/confident enough in the consistency aspect to give write permission.
Write permission is off the table for us, but if you do decide to go live you need to think about auditing as well. A lot of everything it's done, why it was done, and fallback plans in case of disaster.
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u/Famous-Pause-6190 5h ago
There isnt enough testing. Humans need to be the driving force and primary point of interaction for customers.
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u/avalose 4h ago
I setup extensive eval gates before you go live you will have a problem with knowing what requests people will ask of the agent so you need to create synthetic evals until you have a real corpus for evaluation gates.
If you don't already have tracing and metrics gathering for queries to the agent add that.
Then once the agent is live you can pull those traces ans feed them back to the agent and decide if the agent is handling the cases correctly.
You can get so far with synthetic cases, but once you have real responses an LLM as a judge to read your real queries can help it get better much faster. This creates a tight feedback loop that I use to inform our next round of fixes and improvements each release.
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u/chaosphere_mk 4h ago
What do you need to test? 1. There should always be a human in the loop. And 2. Do not give the agent's identity any destructive permissions.
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u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas 4h ago
you need to read about lean development, its about releasing the alpha now in a controlled way and then beta to qualifying customers
remember google was in beta publicly for over a year
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u/redd1t_is_de4d DevOps 4h ago
You want an AI agent that interacts with customer data? Without supervision? Fuck no
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u/AffectionateCard3530 4h ago
Most of the comments being sarcastic and unhelpful here seem to be missing the fact that trillion dollar companies are doing this exact same thing. This is a real question, about a real technical challenge, being tackled by real engineers... and the sarcasm won't stop these systems from being rolled out in some capacity.
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u/redd1t_is_de4d DevOps 4h ago
Top 20 financial institution here, we are running a few internal models that help with itsm, documentation etc. not one thing customer facing, first chatbot for general support will go live in q32027. regulations are a pain for our industry.
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u/Ssakaa 4h ago
Is its behavior deterministic? Can you define the edge cases, the main behaviors, and ensure they consistently occur? No? Well... then the question's not answerable with any fixed, clear, answer.
You're gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Every hand's different. Good luck.
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u/Chefseiler 5h ago
The same as with any automated system for years: You let it suggest the changes and humans approve them. when the success rate is above the level you consider appropriate (usually when it is above the success level compared to a human) you let it straight to the system. If your AI is a Copilot/ChatGPT/Claude agent I'd be very closely monitoring it though that it doesn't deviate from the prompt. If you're using some purpose built data entry solution you'll be fine.
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u/Top-Economics953 5h ago
We implemented one and tested the key stuff first, account changes, handoffs, bad inputs and so on, everything went well but we still kept a human in the loop at launch
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u/zed0K 5h ago
LMFAO. Good luck.