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# Evals Are Infra: Building AI Systems Developers Can Actually Trust


- **Event:** World Congress 2026 North America

## Description

AI teams often treat evals as a gate: a benchmark score, a pass/fail dashboard, or one number that decides whether a system ships. That breaks down quickly in production. Users disagree about what "good" means, behavior shifts across workflows, and agent failures often hide inside traces, tools, permissions, and human handoffs rather than in the final answer.

This talk reframes evals as production infrastructure. I will show how developers can move from mystery scores to systems that expose failure modes: plural rubrics for stakeholder disagreement, trace-level observability, human review loops, failure taxonomies, and semantic drift/anomaly detection. The goal is practical: help teams ship AI products developers can debug, operate, and trust.

## Speaker

### [Phoebe Wang](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@phoebe-wang)

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI


## Related talks at this congress

- [Your Evals Passed. Your Agent Just Emptied a Database.](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1684-your-evals-passed) — Tejas Pravinbhai Patel
- [Reinventing Testing Practices in the AI Era](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1724-reinventing-testing) — Eric Deandrea
- [Closing the Visibility Gap: Lessons from Safety Critical Agentic Systems](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1408-closing-the) — Vivek Pandit
- [Who Tests the AI? Building Trustworthy AI Systems at Enterprise Scale](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1693-who-tests-the-ai) — Him Raj Singh

## Watch remotely

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## Links

- [Get tickets](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress-north-america/tickets)