Beyond Task Success: An Evidence-Synthesis Framework for Evaluating, Governing, and Orchestrating Agentic AI

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Koch, Christopher, Wellbrock, Joshua Andreas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914497568964608
author Koch, Christopher
Wellbrock, Joshua Andreas
author_facet Koch, Christopher
Wellbrock, Joshua Andreas
contents Agentic AI systems plan, use tools, maintain state, and act across multi-step workflows with external effects, meaning trustworthy deployment can no longer be judged by task completion alone. The current literature remains fragmented across benchmark-centered evaluation, standards-based governance, orchestration architectures, and runtime assurance mechanisms. This paper contributes a bounded evidence synthesis across a manually coded corpus of twenty-four recent sources. The core finding is a governance-to-action closure gap: evaluation tells us whether outcomes were good, governance defines what should be allowed, but neither identifies where obligations bind to concrete actions or how compliance can later be proven. To close that gap, the paper introduces three linked artifacts: (1) a four-layer framework spanning evaluation, governance, orchestration, and assurance; (2) an ODTA runtime-placement test based on observability, decidability, timeliness, and attestability; and (3) a minimum action-evidence bundle for state-changing actions. Across sources, evaluation papers identify safety, robustness, and trajectory-level measurement as open gaps; governance frameworks define obligations but omit execution-time control logic; orchestration research positions the control plane as the locus of policy mediation, identity, and telemetry; runtime-governance work shows path-dependent behavior cannot be governed through prompts or static permissions alone; and action-safety studies show text alignment does not reliably transfer to tool actions. A worked enterprise procurement-agent scenario illustrates how these artifacts consolidate existing evidence without introducing new experimental data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19818
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Task Success: An Evidence-Synthesis Framework for Evaluating, Governing, and Orchestrating Agentic AI
Koch, Christopher
Wellbrock, Joshua Andreas
Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
Agentic AI systems plan, use tools, maintain state, and act across multi-step workflows with external effects, meaning trustworthy deployment can no longer be judged by task completion alone. The current literature remains fragmented across benchmark-centered evaluation, standards-based governance, orchestration architectures, and runtime assurance mechanisms. This paper contributes a bounded evidence synthesis across a manually coded corpus of twenty-four recent sources. The core finding is a governance-to-action closure gap: evaluation tells us whether outcomes were good, governance defines what should be allowed, but neither identifies where obligations bind to concrete actions or how compliance can later be proven. To close that gap, the paper introduces three linked artifacts: (1) a four-layer framework spanning evaluation, governance, orchestration, and assurance; (2) an ODTA runtime-placement test based on observability, decidability, timeliness, and attestability; and (3) a minimum action-evidence bundle for state-changing actions. Across sources, evaluation papers identify safety, robustness, and trajectory-level measurement as open gaps; governance frameworks define obligations but omit execution-time control logic; orchestration research positions the control plane as the locus of policy mediation, identity, and telemetry; runtime-governance work shows path-dependent behavior cannot be governed through prompts or static permissions alone; and action-safety studies show text alignment does not reliably transfer to tool actions. A worked enterprise procurement-agent scenario illustrates how these artifacts consolidate existing evidence without introducing new experimental data.
title Beyond Task Success: An Evidence-Synthesis Framework for Evaluating, Governing, and Orchestrating Agentic AI
topic Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19818