---
title: "AI evaluation and acceptance plan | YPAI"
url: https://ypai.ai/ai-implementation/discovery-and-architecture/evaluation-plan/
description: "How YPAI designs acceptance before the prototype: metric families, thresholds, release gates and the evaluation record."
source: "src/copy/routes (route /ai-implementation/discovery-and-architecture/evaluation-plan/)"
---

# Design acceptance before the prototype.

> How YPAI designs acceptance before the prototype: metric families, thresholds, release gates and the evaluation record.

How acceptance is defined before build: the unit being judged, the test population, the grading method, the thresholds, the release gate and the regression policy.

- YPAI defines the evaluation structure before implementation begins. The test set represents the real workflow, including ordinary cases, difficult cases, incomplete inputs, conflicting information, tool failures, permission failures and prohibited actions.
- The architecture is then measured as a system.

## One acceptance plan across product, engineering and operations.

### The unit being judged

- A response, classification, document, case, tool call, workflow or completed business outcome.

### The test population

- Representative work, difficult cases, known failure modes and scenarios the system must refuse.

### The grading method

- Deterministic checks, reference-based scoring, model-based evaluation, human review, specialist adjudication or a combined method.

### The acceptance thresholds

- Required quality, latency, cost, safety, completion and control performance.

### The release gate

- What must pass before pilot, production release or model change.

### The regression policy

- Which evaluations rerun after prompt, model, retrieval, tool, data or workflow changes.

The team knows how success will be measured before build decisions become expensive to reverse.

## The metrics YPAI can measure

### Business outcome metrics

- successful outcomes per unit of time and cost

### Knowledge and retrieval metrics

### Agent and workflow metrics

### Operational metrics

- end-to-end latency at p50, p95 and p99

### Control metrics

- Not every metric belongs in every system.
- The discovery engagement selects the metrics that determine whether the actual workflow succeeds, then attaches thresholds to the approved task set and failure scenarios.