Pharos Production collaborated with a taxi aggregator platform to develop a high-load ride-hailing application that connects passengers and drivers in real time. This platform consolidates various fleets and independent drivers into a single system, ensuring quick ride matching, live tracking and transparent pricing. Built on a cloud-native infrastructure, the solution offers low-latency interactions, reliable trip processing and scalability for operations at the city and regional levels.
Last reviewed August 15, 2026
AI Agent Development Company
Pharos Production delivers custom AI agent development services for enterprises and startups.
- Product and engineering leaders evaluating an agent vs a direct LLM call for a specific workflow
- CTOs planning agent observability, evaluation sets, guardrails and rollback procedures
- Operations teams with manual multi-step workflows considering AI agent automation
- CFOs budgeting for AI agent MVPs and ongoing prompt and eval maintenance
- 25+ AI projects delivered
- 90+ engineers
- 108 Clutch reviews
282 published client reviews across 3 platforms. Counts are summed; reviewers may appear in more than one source.
Profiles checked . Glassdoor: 46 employee reviews, 5.0/5, reported separately.
Case Study
See the products we built and the engineering work involved. Each case describes its scope and delivery context.
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Pharos Production has partnered with Sagas to create a location-aware social platform that enables users to capture, publish and explore geo-located timelapses over time. This system combines real-time data ingestion, large-scale media processing and map-centric discovery to transform physical locations into dynamic digital stories. Leveraging cloud-native infrastructure and event-driven architecture, Sagas allows users to document urban changes, natural evolution and personal moments tied to specific places. The result is a scalable social network where time and location are central to content discovery.
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Pharos Production has partnered with Pulse to create a community-driven social network that connects users with local stores through challenges, engagement activities and real-world prizes. This platform transforms everyday local interactions into interactive experiences, enabling users to earn rewards from participating merchants. Built on a scalable, event-driven architecture, Pulse facilitates real-time interactions between users and businesses and supports rapid growth across cities and regions.
Practice led by Dmytro Nasyrov
Founder and CTO
23+ years in custom software development. Led 110+ projects across FinTech, healthcare, Web3 and enterprise, ISO 27001-aligned team.
Technically reviewed by Victor Sineglazov, D.Sc.
Independent AI Scientific Advisor
Professor, Artificial Intelligence Department, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Head of the Aviation Computer-Integrated Complexes Department, Kyiv Aviation Institute.
Reviewed for technical accuracy on August 15, 2026. Not an endorsement of any commercial claim on this page.
What is AI agent development?
Authoritative citations 6 sources
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NIST AI RMF
AI RMF 1.0 organizes AI risk management through GOVERN, MAP, MEASURE and MANAGE. It does not prescribe a universal agent success rate.
nist.gov
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OWASP LLM Top 10
OWASP describes risks including prompt injection and excessive agency for LLM applications.
owasp.org
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Anthropic engineering
The guide distinguishes workflows from autonomous agents and discusses the complexity, cost and latency of agentic systems.
anthropic.com
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ReAct, Yao et al.
ReAct combines reasoning and actions and evaluates that approach on the tasks described in the paper.
arxiv.org
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Reflexion, Shinn et al.
Reflexion investigates verbal feedback and memory for improving agents on its benchmark tasks. Results are specific to those experiments.
arxiv.org
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HHS covered entities
HIPAA applies to covered entities and business associates. Applicability depends on the organization and its role.
hhs.gov
- Single-prompt LLM features where direct OpenAI/Anthropic SDK usage is cleaner than an agent framework
- Agents without an evaluation set tied to business outcomes
- Use cases where deterministic rules engines would be cheaper and fully auditable
- Real-time systems with sub-100ms latency budgets that LLM inference cannot meet
- Projects with no plan for prompt versioning, drift monitoring or rollback
Agent runtime architecture
How our AI agents think, act and log
The loop every production agent we ship runs on: router, planner, tools, evaluator, guardrail and audit log. Evaluator can retry via the planner or escalate to a human.
AI agent development at Pharos Production at a glance
- Agents shipped: 15+ production AI agents since 2023 (customer support, document Q&A, multi-agent ops, copilots)
- Stack: LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, OpenAI Assistants API, Anthropic Claude, Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock
- Eval discipline: Every agent ships with a >150-question evaluation set tied to business outcomes; refreshed monthly
- Pricing: Pilot agent $60,000-$120,000; production multi-agent system $240,000-$680,000; enterprise platform $510,000-$1,600,000
- Timeline: Discovery 2-3 weeks; agent MVP 6-10 weeks; multi-agent system with monitoring 4-6 months
- Quality gates: Eval set, shadow-mode validation, citation tracking, structured output validation, audit logging, rollback
- Compliance: ISO 27001 and SOC 2 aligned controls on the delivery pipeline; HIPAA de-identification plus VPC-isolated inference for healthcare agents; GDPR and EU AI Act data residency with right-to-explanation logging; PCI DSS tokenization before the LLM ever sees card data
- Honest scope: We recommend direct LLM APIs for single-prompt features and decline agents without an evaluation set
Custom AI agent vs single-prompt LLM call: which is better?
Compare agents and direct model calls on the same workflow. Agents support tool selection and recovery across multiple steps. A direct call has fewer moving parts for a single completion. The choice depends on measured quality, latency, allowed actions and operating cost.
| Factor | Custom AI agent | Direct LLM API call |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning steps | Multi-step planning, tool use, self-correction | Single completion; no tool use unless wrapped manually |
| Tool integration | Native tool calling with structured output validation | Manual function-calling wrapper required for each tool |
| State management | Conversation memory, intermediate state, audit log | Stateless; you manage history |
| Latency | Measure the complete tool and model loop on your workflow | Measure the selected model and workload |
| Cost per request | Include model calls, tool use, retries and hosting | Depends on model, context size and serving configuration |
| Determinism | Lower; agent can choose different paths | Sampling settings alone do not guarantee identical outputs |
| Eval complexity | High; need to test multi-step reasoning paths | Low; test single input/output pairs |
| Best fit | Multi-step workflows, tool orchestration, complex Q&A, copilots | Classification, summarization, structured extraction, single-shot generation |
How we build agents that hold up in production
AI agent projects follow Pharos Verified Delivery with agent-specific gates: discovery defines goal, tool surface and evaluation set; build runs shadow-mode evaluation against human baselines; production readiness includes guardrails, audit logging, drift detection and rollback procedures; support includes prompt versioning, monthly eval refresh and ongoing drift monitoring.
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Phase 01 / 04 Paid Discovery
Week 0
2-4 weeks
- Technical validation
- Architecture proposal
- Scope refined estimate
82% on-schedule with discovery
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Phase 02 / 04 Iterative Build
Week 2-4
2-week sprints
- Working demos every sprint
- CTO review at milestones
- ADRs documented
Transparent progress tracking
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Phase 03 / 04 Production Readiness
Week 8-24
- Monitoring and alerting
- Security audit Pen test
- Runbooks and rollback
ISO 27001 aligned
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Phase 04 / 04 Support
Launch day
Ongoing
In progress
- Security patches
- Performance tuning
- 4h SLA response
Continuous improvement
Pharos Verified Delivery applied to 110+ production applications since 2013
Agents shipping real work
Three agent engagements where we measured accuracy against human baselines before routing real traffic. Client names anonymized under NDA with industry, region and engagement stage preserved. Metrics verified against client telemetry and post-launch production instrumentation.
Customer support agent
12 full-time agents handling 8,000 tickets per week. Average response time 4.2 hours. Tier-1 questions consumed 70% of agent capacity.
Custom AI agent deflects 62% of tier-1 tickets with 91% customer satisfaction. Agents now focus on complex cases. Response time on remaining tickets dropped to 28 minutes.
We started with a 200-question evaluation set built from real ticket history, ran the agent in shadow-mode for 3 weeks against human responses and only routed live traffic once accuracy beat the human baseline on tier-1 categories.
Document Q&A copilot
Junior attorneys spent 6-8 hours per case reviewing precedent documents. Inconsistent citations across the team.
RAG system over 50,000 case documents with 3-second response time. Citation precision 94% verified against ground truth. Junior attorney research time cut by 75%.
Built on a private vector store with citation tracking back to source paragraphs. Every answer ships with a verifiable footnote so partners can audit any response in under 30 seconds.
Multi-agent operations
Manual orchestration of 6 internal tools for finance ops. 14-day month-end close. Three full-time analysts.
Multi-agent system with finance specialist, data extractor, validator and reporter. Month-end close in 3 days with full audit trail. Analysts redeployed to higher-value forecasting work.
Each agent has a narrow tool surface and a structured handoff protocol. Every action is logged with the full prompt, intermediate state and final tool call, so finance can replay and audit any close-cycle step on demand.
Client names anonymized under NDA. Full case studies at /cases/.
When an AI agent is not the answer
We decline roughly 30% of RFPs we receive. Forcing a bad fit costs both sides 3-6 months and damages outcomes. Here is how we think about scope:
- Single-prompt features where a direct LLM API call is cleaner than an agent framework
- Workflows with stable rules that a deterministic engine can implement and audit
- Workflows requiring zero-error guarantees on individual actions (medical dosing, financial settlement)
- Real-time systems with sub-100ms latency budgets
- Projects with no plan for prompt versioning, drift monitoring or rollback
Use an agent when the next action depends on information discovered during execution. Compare a direct model call for a single completion and a deterministic workflow for stable rules. Measure task quality, latency and total operating cost before committing to orchestration.
Background reading before you decide
State of AI Development Costs 2026 Original Pharos research on AI project costs based on 25+ delivered systems including agents, RAG and multi-agent architectures. Continue readingPharos AI agent portfolio
Pharos AI agent delivery portfolio observations, 2023-2026
Ranges we consistently see across 12+ production AI agent engagements.
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82-94% end-to-end task completion on mature agents after 4-8 weeks of eval iteration; below 75% signals prompt and tool design needs rework.
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Build duration depends on tool integrations and evaluation scope; use the MVP and multi-agent planning ranges above for budgeting.
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$2.5k-$15k per month in inference and tool spend for mid-volume agents; scales to $20k-$60k at high-volume use.
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3-15 tool calls per task on mature agents; outlier runs at 50+ calls flagged for investigation within 24 hours.
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Prompt or tool-set changes ship in 2-4 hours after eval parity check; major architecture changes 1-2 weeks.
Decisions before an agent reaches production
Test the tool surface and failure paths on the workflow you intend to automate.
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Tool-call validation
Check tool selection, arguments and returned status on a versioned task set. Include duplicate requests, timeouts and partial failures.
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Orchestration scope
Compare a single agent with a workflow or specialist agents using the same tasks. Record the quality gain alongside added latency and maintenance.
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Action permissions
Define which actions require approval, which can be reversed and which must be blocked. Set a tool-call budget and test that it stops loops.
Four dimensions for an agent evaluation plan
The weights below are an illustrative starting point. Agree task-specific thresholds, critical failures and evidence owners before testing. NIST and OWASP do not set these weights.
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30%
Task completion reliability
Task success, tool accuracy, error recovery
Use held-out tasks representative of expected traffic. Record successful tasks over attempted tasks and examine failures by workflow and tool.
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25%
Safety and scope
Permission checks, refusal behavior, rollback
Test forbidden actions and adversarial inputs. Define release-blocking failures separately from the aggregate score; a weighted average must not hide an unsafe action.
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25%
Cost and latency
Cost per task, P95 completion time, tool-call budget
Measure under the expected concurrency and model configuration. Set budgets from the user workflow and test timeouts and loop termination.
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20%
Observability
Trace coverage, version IDs, retention policy
Capture the model, prompt and tool versions needed to replay failures. Apply access controls, redaction and a retention period agreed for the data being processed.
Production post-mortem
When an agent looped 340 times on one email
A customer service agent deployed in July 2025 hit a corner case where the reply-send tool returned ambiguous success/failure status. The agent interpreted the ambiguous response as "try again" and resent the same email 340 times before the tool-call budget tripped. Caught when the customer raised a ticket about mailbox flooding.
Tool-call budget and deduplication key now mandatory on every stateful tool. Idempotency keys added to email and message-send actions. Tool-response ambiguity eliminated via explicit status codes.
Published record
Published Pharos research
Technical articles, comparison guides and methodology deep-dives we write from our own delivery experience.
- State of AI Development Costs 2026
- AI Agent Frameworks Comparison 2026
- Build vs Buy AI Agent: 2026 Decision Framework
- RAG vs Fine-Tuning: When to Use Each Approach
- How to Choose an AI Development Company
- State of Smart Contract Audits 2026
- State of Production AI Engineering 2026
- State of FinTech Compliance Cost 2026
- State of Custom Software TCO 2026
- State of AppSec 2026
- State of Tech Due Diligence 2026
- State of QA and Software Testing 2026
- State of DevOps and Cloud 2026
- How to Choose a Blockchain Development Company
- How to Choose a FinTech Development Company
- FinTech Compliance Checklist 2026: PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR and Beyond
- AI in FinTech: Transforming Financial Services in 2026
- Software Development Cost Guide: What to Expect in 2026
- How to Choose a Software Development Company in 2026
- Cybersecurity Essentials for Startups and SMBs in 2026
- FinTech Trends 2026: How Top FinTech Trends are Shaping Digital Banking
Platforms we work with
Technology platforms and company references shown for identification. A logo does not establish a commercial partnership or endorsement.
16 references-
Consensys
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Gate.io
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Coinbase
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Ludo
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Core Scientific
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Debut Infotech
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Axoni
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Alchemy
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StarkWare
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MARA Holdings
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MicroStrategy
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Nubank
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OKX
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Uniswap
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Riot
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LeewayHertz
About the founder and CTO
Founder and CTO Pharos Production
I design and build reliable software solutions - from lightweight apps to high-load distributed systems and blockchain platforms.
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, MSc in Computer Science (with honors), MSc in Electronics & Precision Mechanics.
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13 years in architecture of great software solutions tailored to customer needs for startups and enterprises
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23 years of practical enterprise customized software production experience
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Lecturer at the National Kyiv Polytechnic University
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Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence
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Master's degree in Computer Science, completed with excellence
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Master's degree in Electronics and precision mechanics engineering
Choose your project scope
Pharos Production scopes engagements in three tiers, AI discovery and PoC, Production AI system and Enterprise AI platform, with typical budgets from $15,000 to $500,000+ depending on scope and complexity.
AI discovery and PoC
Feasibility study, prototype on your data and integration roadmap in four to eight weeks.
Production AI system
Full model development, API layer, cloud deployment and MLOps with monitoring.
Enterprise AI platform
Multi-model architecture, custom data infrastructure, compliance and hybrid or on-prem delivery.
Prices vary based on project scope, complexity, timeline and requirements. Hourly rates range from $50 to $99 depending on role and seniority. Contact us for a personalized estimate.
Interaction models for staff augmentation, dedicated teams and outsourcing
Request staff augmentation
Need extra hands on your software project? Our developers can jump in at any stage - from architecture to auditing - and integrate seamlessly with your team to fill any technical gaps.
Hire dedicated experts
Whether you're building from scratch or scaling fast, our engineers are ready to step in. You stay in control, and we handle the code.
Outsource your project
From first line to final audit, we handle the entire development process. We will deliver secure, production-ready software, while you can focus on your business.
Technologies, tools and frameworks we use
We select the stack for your product, integrations and operating requirements.
AI and Machine Learning
LLM Providers 8
AI Frameworks 15
Vector Databases 7
MLOps and Infrastructure 11
AI Agent Tools 4
Partnerships and awards
Selected badges from Clutch, GoodFirms and The Manifest. Open the issuer profiles to review categories and dates.
An approach to the development cycle
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Team Assembly
Our company starts and assembles an entire project specialists with the perfect blend of skills and experience to start the work.
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MVP
We'll design, build and launch your MVP, ensuring it meets the core requirements of your software solution.
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Production
We'll create a complete software solution that is custom-made to meet your exact specifications.
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Continuous Support
Our company will be right there with you, keeping your software solution running smoothly, fixing issues and rolling out updates.
AI agent engineering insights
AI agent glossary 8
- AI Agent
- A software system that uses a language model to plan and take actions toward a goal, calling tools and APIs rather than only answering questions. Agents loop between reasoning and acting, which lets them handle multi-step tasks with limited human input.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- A model trained on vast text that generates and understands natural language. LLMs are the reasoning core of modern AI agents, but they need grounding, tools and guardrails to be reliable in production.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- A technique that fetches relevant documents from a knowledge base and feeds them to the model so answers are grounded in current, specific data. RAG reduces hallucination and lets an agent work with private or up-to-date information.
- Tool Calling
- The mechanism that lets an agent invoke external functions, APIs or databases to act in the world. Well-defined tools with clear inputs and outputs are what turn a chatbot into an agent that can actually get work done.
- Hallucination
- When a model produces fluent output that is factually wrong or invented. It is the central reliability risk in AI systems, mitigated with retrieval, verification steps and constraining the model to trusted data and tools.
- Vector Database
- A store that holds text as numerical embeddings and retrieves items by semantic similarity rather than exact keywords. It is the retrieval layer behind most RAG systems, letting an agent find relevant context fast.
- Prompt Engineering
- Designing the instructions and context given to a model to get reliable, well-formatted results. In agents this extends to system prompts, tool descriptions and examples that shape how the model reasons and acts.
- Guardrails
- The checks and limits that keep an agent behavior safe and on-task, such as input validation, output filtering and action approval. Production agents need guardrails to prevent harmful, off-topic or runaway actions.
AI agent development FAQ
Type to filter questions and answers. Use Topic to narrow the list.
Showing all 9
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When should we build an AI agent vs a direct LLM call?
Build an agent when the task requires multi-step reasoning, tool use (databases, APIs, code execution), conversation state across turns or routing between specialized capabilities. Use a direct LLM call (OpenAI/Anthropic SDK) for single-shot tasks: classification, summarization, structured extraction, single-question Q&A. Most "AI features" are actually direct calls. Agents are for workflows, not features.
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How long does it take to ship an AI agent?
Allow 2-3 weeks for discovery and evaluation planning, then an estimated 6-10 weeks for a single-purpose MVP. A production multi-agent system with monitoring is estimated at 4-6 months.
These are scope-dependent planning ranges, not additive fixed phases or delivery guarantees. Data access, tool integration and acceptance criteria affect the schedule.
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How much does AI agent development cost?
Pilot agent $60,000-$120,000. Production multi-agent system $240,000-$680,000. Enterprise platform $510,000-$1,600,000. Cost drivers: number of tools the agent integrates with, evaluation set complexity, observability and audit logging, regulatory requirements, post-launch monitoring tier. The biggest hidden cost is NOT the LLM bill - it is the evaluation set, guardrails and observability you need to safely run agents in production.
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How do you handle hallucinations?
Layered controls: grounded retrieval (RAG with citation tracking), structured output schemas with validation, confidence thresholds with human handoff, evaluation set tested on every deploy, runtime guardrails that flag low-confidence answers. We instrument every response so you can audit any answer back to its source documents. Hallucinations cannot be eliminated, but they can be detected, contained and recovered from.
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Which agent framework do you use?
LangChain or LlamaIndex for most production work - biggest ecosystems, best tool integrations. DSPy when we need structured prompt optimization. OpenAI Assistants API or Anthropic Claude tool use for simpler agent patterns. Sometimes no framework at all - a tight loop of LLM call + tool dispatch is often the cleanest production code. The choice depends on agent complexity, observability needs and team familiarity.
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How do you measure agent performance?
Every agent ships with an evaluation set of 150-300 questions tied to business outcomes (deflection rate, citation precision, task completion, customer satisfaction). The eval set runs on every deploy and on a nightly schedule against the production model.
Drift is measured month-over-month on the same eval set with the same model - if accuracy drops more than 3 points, we investigate. Human spot-checks supplement automated evals on consequential decisions.
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How do you handle data privacy and regulated industries?
First establish the data categories, jurisdictions and responsibilities. For a HIPAA-covered workflow, agree the business associate contract where required and the safeguards for PHI.
Model hosting, redaction, access controls and trace retention follow that scope. A BAA is a contract, not an audit certificate. Independent assurance reports such as SOC 2 are a separate engagement and do not certify every system or use case.
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How do you handle GDPR and the EU AI Act for agent deployments?
EU data subject workflows run inside the region by default (AWS Frankfurt, GCP Belgium, Azure West Europe). Personal data is redacted or tokenized before the LLM ever sees it, with the redaction key held by the client. Every agent decision that affects a natural person is logged with the full prompt, tool calls, retrieved context and final output, so we can satisfy a GDPR right-to-explanation request in minutes rather than days. For EU AI Act high-risk use cases we classify the system upfront against Annex III, document the risk profile, run bias and fairness checks on the evaluation set and maintain a version history of prompts and models so the regulator audit trail is available from day one.
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When does Pharos decline an agent project?
We decline single-prompt features dressed up as agents (use a direct call), agents without an evaluation set tied to business outcomes (no way to know if the agent works), workflows that need zero-error guarantees on individual actions (medical dosing, financial settlement), real-time systems with sub-100ms latency budgets and projects with no plan for prompt maintenance or drift monitoring.
What to bring to an agent readiness call
Bring one workflow, the available tools, permitted actions and examples of successful and failed tasks. These inputs let us compare a deterministic workflow, a direct model call and an agent against the same outcome.
Book an AI agent readiness call
Ship an agent that passes evaluation before it passes traffic
Book a 30-minute call with our AI delivery team and walk away with a scoped evaluation set, a sandbox plan and an honest yes-or-no on whether an agent is the right answer for your workflow.
What happens next?
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Contact us
Contact us today to discuss your project. We're ready to review your request promptly and guide you on the best next steps for collaboration
Same day -
NDA
We're committed to keeping your information confidential, so we'll sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement
1 day -
Plan the Goals
After we chat about your goals and needs, we'll craft a comprehensive proposal detailing the project scope, team, timeline and budget
3-5 days -
Finalize the Details
Let's connect on Google Meet to go through the proposal and confirm all the details together!
1-2 days -
Sign the Contract
As soon as the contract is signed, our dedicated team will jump into action on your project!
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