AI & Technical question
A Fortune 500 prospect wants to automate high-value support interactions across chat, email, SMS, and voice, but the C-suite doubts an AI agent can do this safely. How would you structure a pre-sales pilot: which workflows would you start with, what model failure modes and guardrails would you test, what offline and online evals and success thresholds would you require, and how would those results translate into a full production rollout?
- Decagon
- AI & Technical
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests structuring a pre-sales pilot with concrete evals and thresholds to prove agent safety and reliability to a skeptical enterprise leadership team.
How to approach it
- Start the pilot on the lowest-risk, highest-volume workflow, such as order status, rather than complex escalations, to build a credible track record.
- Define failure modes to test explicitly: hallucinated policy answers, incorrect actions taken via tools, and inappropriate escalation.
- Define guardrails to test, like confidence-based handoff to a human and hard limits on autonomous actions such as refunds above a threshold.
- Define offline evals against a labeled set of past tickets, and online evals like containment rate, satisfaction, and escalation accuracy.
- Set explicit success thresholds before the pilot starts, such as a minimum satisfaction score and maximum error rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Sequences channels and workflows by risk, starting with chat on a narrow low-risk workflow before adding voice or high-value cases.
- Names concrete failure modes to test, like incorrect tool-driven actions, not just that the agent might say something wrong.
- Sets pre-agreed thresholds before the pilot, so success isn't renegotiated after seeing favorable results.
- Proposes a graduated rollout, expanding scope only as each threshold is met, not a single big-bang decision.
Common mistakes
- Starting the pilot on a high-value, complex workflow to impress leadership instead of building trust on a safe one first.
- Leaving success thresholds undefined until after the pilot results come in.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the pilot passed on chat but failed on voice?
- How would you set the dollar threshold for autonomous actions like refunds?
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More questions from Decagon
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 1: Foundations: the model and the decisions it forces on you
- Chapter 8: Evals: define good and make the number defensible
- Chapter 6: Agents and agentic architecture