Practical AI / 2026 Essentials
Test Your AI Assistant Before Customers Do
Use realistic questions and explicit expectations to catch failures before release.
A convincing demonstration is not a complete evaluation. A useful AI assistant must handle normal questions, ambiguous requests, and missing evidence. Microsoft’s RAG evaluation guidance separates the quality of retrieved context from the quality of the model’s final answer, making failures easier to diagnose.
What matters
- Create a test set from actual tasks, with expected facts and acceptable limitations.
- Check whether answers use relevant evidence and stay within the requested scope.
- Repeat the evaluation after changes to documents, prompts, retrieval settings, or models.
Practical example: A support assistant is tested on a common setup question, an outdated procedure, and a request outside its documentation.
One action today: Write twenty representative questions and record what a correct or appropriately limited answer looks like.