Agent success now depends less on completing tasks than on whether every counterparty with standing to reject recognizes the action as authorized.

Drouin's projects trace how agent evaluation evolved from checking task completion to verifying that outcomes are grounded, cited, and structurally real. The progression reveals a field learning that the hardest problem is not capability but verifiability.

Research tracing how ServiceNow's benchmark work reveals that defining correctness for enterprise agent tasks is the real deployment bottleneck.