Introducing Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment (READY), an evaluation framework for qualifying AI agents for deployment on concrete enterprise workflows.
An AI agent can perform well on benchmarks and still be unsuitable for deployment. Existing AI-agent benchmarks primarily measure whether an agent can complete realistic professional work, whereas enterprise deployment requires asking a different question: whether an agent can meet a required reliability level, under an acceptable level of human oversight, and at a tolerable cost. We introduce Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment (READY), an evaluation framework for qualifying AI agents for deployment on concrete enterprise workflows. READY preserves each workflow’s own definition of successful execution while applying a common deployment-qualification procedure. Given an agent, a workflow, and a class of candidate oversight policies, READY measures the reliability and operating cost of the human-AI system, selects the minimum-cost policy that satisfies a specified reliability target, and statistically qualifies the selected policy on held-out cases. The deployment profile characterizes the operating point supported by the evidence, including reliability, human-oversight burden, and cost. READY is implemented as an open testbed that decouples workflow specification, execution, evaluation, and deployment qualification, and runs on existing agent-evaluation infrastructure.
In an end-to-end clinical-audit case study spanning 16 agent systems and 750 cases, READY reveals deployment differences hidden by autonomous benchmark performance: two systems separated by only 0.3 percentage points in autonomous accuracy (72.8% vs. 72.5%) require 39.2% versus 29.6% human review, respectively, to qualify at the same 76% reliability target under the evaluated oversight policy. Systems with nearly identical autonomous performance can support substantially different reliability–oversight tradeoffs. Accordingly, READY shifts enterprise agent evaluation from asking only how well can the agent perform the work? to asking under what conditions, and at what cost, can it be reliably deployed? By making those conditions explicit and statistically testable, READY provides a practical basis for comparing agent systems, setting oversight requirements, and making evidence-based deployment decisions.