Eval Engineering: AI Governance's Critical Missing Link

As AI agents grow more powerful, governance solutions struggle to keep them in check. The leading approach uses multiple independent validator agents to monitor performance, but a major bottleneck remains: validators are too slow and costly for real-time automation. Eval engineering, which combines LLM-as-a-judge scoring with software testing and observability, offers a path forward. Vendors like Comet ML, Confident AI, and Klover AI are tackling this challenge across testing, decision support, and full lifecycle governance, though production-level agentic oversight remains the hardest problem to solve.