Why Your AI Agents Need Performance Reviews, Too

Hiring a person comes with a built-in vetting process — resumes, interviews, reference checks — that gives you real confidence they'll behave predictably once they're on the team. Hiring an "agent" skips all of that. You get something capable, sometimes brilliant, with none of the track record.

In this episode, Redpanda CTO Tyler Akidau sits down with Head of AI Marc Millstone to unpack why the enterprises actually getting production value out of agents aren't the fastest movers — they're the ones who can explain, after the fact, exactly what an agent did and why. Drawing on patterns Tyler's seen across dozens of enterprise conversations, they get into what a real evaluation process for an agent looks like, why it has to go well beyond a traditional audit log, and what to get right from day one if you're just getting started.