Try Before You Buy: The Case for Rigorous AI Testing

We’re at a uniquely promising and perilous point in the AI timeline where adoption is speeding up but safeguards aren’t. Every other day, a customer gets cussed out by a customer service bot or told by a web agent that it is safe to eat rocks.

For any serious company, these scenarios are embarrassing and fatal. The way to avoid this is by testing, but running evaluation processes are a logistical and technical headache. A given product has countless methods of interaction and decision branches a user can take. For an enterprise to pilot, sensitive data needs to be approved, a testing user pool needs to be gathered, and benchmarks and automated harnesses must be built. Even after finishing this burdensome process, the testing process often misses various edge cases that compound to catastrophic errors.

We at Toyon automate testing and monitoring AI products. We run tens of thousands of simulated AI users that can speak, click, type, and hear. In parallel, they explore the possible paths through a product to make sure every surface is stable. For example, for a customer service AI agent, Toyon spawns thousands of callers testing the main conversational paths in all supported languages, and then tests a custom set of likely failure modes derived from failure data we have gathered for similar products and workflows within each company’s industry.

Toyon then outputs a comprehensive map of each product flow, its failure rate, and overall risk profile, with hard numeric data and reproduction steps. For enterprises piloting AI, this means that instead of building benchmarks from scratch and running three-month user acceptance trials, the majority of testing can be finished on day one. For enterprises deploying AI, this means that continuous monitoring will ensure the AI is working as intended. For engineering teams, this means it becomes possible to ship AI code with full confidence that primary flows are not broken.

Here at Toyon, we believe it is critical that AI products are tested in every possible scenario. If you’re not catching your bugs caused by AI, your customers will.