Why Eval Pipelines Decide Which Agencies Keep AI Retainers

Model capability stopped being the bottleneck; workflow integration and verified output quality are. Agencies that instrument AI deployments with tracing, scoring, and drift detection can price work as production-ready and defend it with evidence, while shops shipping unmonitored agents absorb failures on their own margin. The gap widens every time a frontier release resets client expectations faster than delivery teams can test.