Beyond Vibe Testing: Smarter Eval for Agentic AI

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and Byron explore Salesforce’s CRMArena-Pro benchmark and what it reveals about the limits of enterprise AI agents. They share why benchmark scores often fail in production, how inference-time tactics like best-of-N can improve reliability, and what NeuroMetric is building to make eval easier—from an ITC Test Engine to a drag-and-drop interface for rapid visualization and experimentation.

 

We talked about:

 

• Why Salesforce’s CRMArena-Pro benchmark highlights the gap between lab benchmarks and real-world agent reliability.
• How leading models perform inconsistently across single-turn and multi-turn enterprise tasks.
• Why benchmark scores are weak predictors of operational success in production.
• The role of inference-time tactics in reducing variance and improving stability.
• NeuroMetric’s new platform: ITC Test Engine and drag-and-drop interface for experimentation.
• Challenges in building agentic systems, from database integration to managing multi-prompt complexity.
• Why large language models’ stochastic nature conflicts with business demands for reliability.
• Latency, cost, and rate limits as major bottlenecks in scaling agentic workflows.
• The limits of “vibe testing” and why rigorous evaluation frameworks are essential.
• How Google’s Stacks tool speeds up evaluation with LLM-as-judge, and why it still falls short for enterprise needs.

Resources Mentioned:

CRMArena-Pro from Saleforce:

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/crmarena-pro/  

 

Connect with Neurometric:
Website: https://www.neurometric.ai/ 

Substack: https://neurometric.substack.com/ 

X: https://x.com/neurometric/ 

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/neurometric.bsky.social

 

Hosts:

Rob May

https://x.com/robmay 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay

 

Calvin Cooper

https://x.com/cooper_nyc_ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc

 

Guest/s:

Byron Galbraith

https://x.com/bgalbraith 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/byrongalbraith