Microsoft’s new open‑source Evals for Agent Interop starter kit lets organizations evaluate AI agents across core Microsoft 365 services such as Email, Calendar, Teams, and Documents. The kit provides ready‑made scenarios, a unified evaluation harness, and a public leaderboard, enabling fast, auditable benchmarking of agent performance, reliability, and user‑experience trade‑offs.
What the Kit Includes
The starter kit ships with declarative evaluation specifications that simulate everyday digital work. Initially it supports Email and Calendar scenarios, with plans to add more use cases, richer rubrics, and additional judge options. The evaluation harness measures quality, efficiency, robustness, and user‑experience, producing results that can be audited for governance.
Public Leaderboard
A public leaderboard benchmarks agents built with different frameworks (e.g., Semantic Kernel, LangGraph) and large language models (e.g., GPT‑5.2). Enterprises can compare stack performance on identical tasks and rubrics, helping them select the optimal combination for their workloads.
Why the Kit Matters
Traditional AI metrics—accuracy, latency, token usage—miss the end‑to‑end behavior of agents that must interact with multiple Microsoft services. This kit delivers a reproducible, transparent evaluation suite that shifts enterprise AI assessment from isolated model metrics to real‑world, customer‑informed performance.
Cross‑Stack Interoperability
Agents embedded in workflows spanning email, calendar scheduling, document generation, and collaborative chat must navigate differing APIs, security models, and data formats. The evaluation harness provides a single path to test these connections end‑to‑end, reducing hidden failures when moving from sandbox to production.
Integration with the Copilot SDK Ecosystem
The kit complements the GitHub Copilot SDK, which enables developers to build AI agents using Node.js, Python, Go, or .NET. While the SDK focuses on agent creation, Evals for Agent Interop supplies the tooling needed to assess agents in realistic Microsoft 365 contexts.
Benefits for Developers and Enterprises
Developers gain a ready‑made testing framework, eliminating the need to craft custom harnesses. They can adopt Microsoft’s declarative specs, run evaluations instantly, and compare results on the public leaderboard, accelerating iteration cycles.
Enterprises receive a governance‑ready artifact. Standardized evaluation results can be tied to configurable rubrics, allowing compliance teams to audit agent behavior against internal policies before deployment. The kit also supports custom grading criteria and domain‑specific dataset validation.
Future Outlook
Future releases will expand scenario coverage to include Teams conversations, SharePoint document handling, and additional Microsoft 365 touchpoints. As the leaderboard incorporates more frameworks and large language models, it may become the de‑facto benchmark for enterprise AI agents, reinforcing a complete end‑to‑end ecosystem: build with the Copilot SDK, test with Evals for Agent Interop, and deploy through Agent 365.
