Turning Fails into Features: Zapier’s Hard-Won Eval Lessons — Rafal Willinski, Vitor Balocco, Zapier

This talk focuses on mastering AI evaluation, moving from initial development to production. It emphasizes that even the best large language models (LLMs) require a robust testing framework due to issues like hallucinations and performance degradation with changes. Effective evaluation helps answer critical questions about model selection, cost-effectiveness, brand consistency, and ongoing improvement, ultimately reducing development time, costs, and enabling faster iteration.

The core thesis of this talk is that 2025 will finally be the year for robust AI evaluation, driven by the convergence of several key factors. The increasing understanding of AI by business leaders, coupled with budget shifts towards generative AI projects, has set the stage. Crucially, the rise of agentic systems, which make decisions and take actions, introduces significant complexity and risk, making rigorous evaluation a necessity rather than an option.

This talk emphasizes that robust evaluations are the most critical, yet often overlooked, component for successfully scaling generative AI workloads. The speaker argues that evaluations are not merely for measuring quality but are primarily a tool for discovering problems within AI systems. Implementing a strong evaluation framework is presented as the key differentiator between a project that remains a science experiment and one that achieves production-level success and scalability.

This talk focuses on the critical process of evaluating AI agents, emphasizing a shift from ad-hoc testing to a more methodical approach. It highlights that effective evaluation should begin at the earliest stages of AI development, not as an afterthought. The presentation introduces tools and frameworks, particularly the Azure AI Evaluation SDK, to ensure AI agents behave correctly and safely as they gain more independence.

This talk introduces Agentic GraphRAG, a method for simplifying data retrieval across both structured and unstructured sources. It proposes using a knowledge graph as an intermediary layer to enhance agentic workflows. By modeling data within a graph, agents can more accurately decompose complex questions, pull relevant information, and perform analytical tasks that go beyond simple semantic search.