Surface Area Research

Field notes on agents that pay back

Deep dives on ROI-linked evals, trace-space evaluation, and the infrastructure enterprises need to make agents reliably better, cheaper, and safer over time.

Research— 18 min read

Efficient Agent Evals: An ROI-First Playbook

Agent evals are becoming the new production infrastructure for enterprise AI. Surface Area's view is that the winning eval systems will not be generic scorecards; they will be ROI-linked control loops that learn from traces, simulate changes, govern agent releases, and compound operational knowledge across teams.

Surface Area Research·July 1, 2026