Choose a Business KPI for the Agent's Actual Job
Shashank Agarwal
An agent KPI should describe progress on the job the application is meant to perform. A convenient model or traffic measure may not answer that question.
Quick answer: Start with the user's intended outcome, define an observable qualifying event and preserve the operating constraints around it. Track supporting quality and execution measures separately. Choose a KPI that informs a decision, and do not treat a proxy as proven business value.
Define the actual task
For an illustrative appointment agent, the task may be an appropriate confirmed booking or a supported explanation when no suitable option exists.
A count of conversations or tool calls does not establish that result.
| Measure type | Example question |
|---|---|
| Task outcome | Was the appropriate result established? |
| Quality boundary | Were permission and constraints respected? |
| Execution | Did dependencies and transport work? |
| Efficiency | What effort or time did the task consume? |
| Commercial context | Which business decision does the measure inform? |
This is a proposed KPI design, not a measured customer scorecard.
Avoid rewarding the wrong behavior
A completion target can reward an agent that claims success without action evidence. A low-error target can reward an agent that refuses legitimate work.
Include cases where the system should succeed, clarify or stop. The metric should not make a shortcut look like value.
Define the identity and window
State whether the measure counts tasks, users, accounts or organizations and which period applies. Preserve partial and uncertain results as appropriate.
If only a sample is evaluated, identify the selection method before describing the KPI as production-wide.
Use supporting measures for diagnosis
A business-facing outcome can lead to component evidence when it changes. Latency, retries and grader results help investigate the cause, but they do not replace the outcome definition.
See the acceptance-criteria guide and metric-specification guide to connect the KPI to inspectable evidence.
I'm Shashank Agarwal, founder and CEO of Noveum AI and creator of API.market. Follow my work on LinkedIn. Drafted with AI assistance.
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