Engineering service

AI Evaluation & Observability

Make AI quality measurable before launch and observable as models, data and workflows change.

The engagement, plainly

What this service delivers.

Evaluation defines whether an AI workflow is good enough for its intended use. Observability shows what it does after release. Together they connect offline tests, production traces and incident review to practical release decisions.

  1. Versioned tasks and risk categories
  2. Automated checks and human calibration
  3. Release comparison and approval
  4. Production traces and regression feedback

An illustrative starting scope

For a knowledge assistant, separate retrieval failures from unsupported answers and access-control errors. A release candidate is compared with a baseline using versioned tasks. Human review checks ambiguous cases and calibrates automated scoring; a single average must not hide serious failure classes.

Who this is for

  • Teams moving AI into production
  • Products with costly or regulated errors
  • Engineering teams changing models or prompts

Workflows

  • Task-level quality evaluation
  • Hallucination and retrieval testing
  • Agent trace review
  • Latency, cost and drift monitoring

What we need

  • Representative tasks and expected outcomes
  • Risk and severity definitions
  • Production traces where available
  • Release and escalation policies

What you receive

Versioned evaluation dataset

Automated regression suite

Quality and operations dashboard

Release gates and incident playbook

Acceptance and handover

Deliver a maintained test set, documented scoring rules and a repeatable release report. Define alert ownership and review intervals. Test data must be access-controlled and representative; passing a benchmark does not certify a system safe for every future input.

Integration and deployment

Connect versioned task fixtures, application traces and release tooling. Redact sensitive records and document components that cannot be observed.

Keep evaluation data within its permitted boundary. Separate offline release checks from production telemetry and specify retention and alert ownership.

Security and human review

Calibrate automated scorers against human judgements. Report errors by severity and give an accountable owner control over release exceptions.

Boundaries

A single aggregate score can hide critical failures

Evaluation sets need ongoing maintenance

Automated judges require calibration against human review

Common questions

What teams ask before starting.

Can you evaluate a system built by another team?

Yes, subject to sufficient access to its intended tasks, outputs and operating constraints. A black-box assessment can test behavior; deeper diagnosis usually needs traces and component visibility. The scope should state what could not be observed.

What does a ai evaluation & observability engagement need to begin?

A defined workflow, representative examples, and the relevant integration, deployment, and governance constraints. Typical inputs include representative tasks and expected outcomes, risk and severity definitions, production traces where available, release and escalation policies.

How does Alector Lab validate the system?

We agree acceptance criteria, test against representative data, document failure modes, and add regression checks before staged production use.

What should this system not be used for?

A single aggregate score can hide critical failures Evaluation sets need ongoing maintenance Automated judges require calibration against human review

Map a service to your workflow.

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