Why AI Agent Verification Is A Critical Industry

Forbes

a day ago

AI agent on smartphone
The year of AI agents
In 2025, artificial intelligence is taking a decisive leap forward. Not only in how it thinks, but also in how it acts. We are now in the era of AI agents: autonomous systems that don't just analyse data or generate text, but that take action on our behalf. They book travel, manage budgets, file insurance claims, and increasingly, they will operate with little or no human supervision.
Until recently, most AI products functioned as sophisticated advisors. ChatGPT could help you draft an email. Midjourney could create a beautiful image. But the AI itself didn't hit 'send' or post the image to your social media accounts. Now, AI agents can do both - and much more. With access to keyboards, APIs, and payment systems, they will increasingly act directly in the real world. This evolution opens enormous productivity gains, but it also introduces profound new risks.
That is where the emerging field of AI agent verification comes in, led by companies like Conscium. Verifying that an AI agent behaves safely, reliably, and within bounds is becoming as critical as cybersecurity was in the early days of the internet. This isn't just best practice: it's an existential requirement for businesses deploying agents at scale.
Why Verification Matters
Imagine an AI agent tasked with reconciling expenses for a major corporation. It has access to financial records, emails, and approval workflows. If it processes reimbursements too loosely, it could cost the company millions. If it's too strict, it will infuriate employees. Now imagine that agent is just one of thousands deployed by the company across accounting, customer service, and procurement. These are not theoretical risks; they are live, operational questions.
AI agents operate in dynamic environments. They draw on large language models, integrate with enterprise tools, and make decisions based on ambiguous instructions. Unlike traditional software, their behaviour isn't always predictable. This makes conventional testing, like unit tests and manual code reviews, woefully inadequate. What is needed is a new layer of oversight: a way to continuously monitor, simulate, and verify agent behaviour across a range of tasks and scenarios before these agents are let loose.
The Current Gaps
Today, most of the verification work in AI is focused on the foundation models, the LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, and Mistral. These models are tested for bias, hallucination, and prompt injection through a mix of red teaming, sandboxing, and manual evaluation. But the agents built on top of these models are not subject to the same rigour. That's a problem.
Agents don't just generate content. They interpret instructions, make autonomous decisions, and often operate over multiple steps in unpredictable ways. Testing how an agent responds to a prompt is very different from testing how it executes a ten-step financial workflow that includes interactions with both human and other AI agents across multiple platforms. The current testing approaches simply don't address these kinds of complex, real-world scenarios.
What we need is a service that simulates real-world environments, edge cases, and interactions between multiple agents. There's no standardised, repeatable, or automated way to stress-test how an agent behaves in mission-critical settings. And yet companies are deploying these systems rapidly, even in regulated industries like banking, insurance, and healthcare.
The Opportunity
According to a recent report, over half of mid-to-large enterprises already use AI agents in some capacity. Leaders in banking, telecoms, and retail are deploying dozens of agents, and sometimes hundreds. By 2028, we're likely to see billions of AI agents operating globally, with a projected annual growth rate of around 50% until the end of the decade.
This explosion creates a huge demand for verification services. Just as the rise of cloud computing created a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry, the rise of AI agents will demand new infrastructure for oversight and assurance. Companies like Conscium aim to be the leaders in this next frontier.
Verification will be particularly crucial in sectors where errors have legal, financial, or health consequences, such as:
Customer Support: If agents can issue refunds, and close accounts, a single misstep can result in regulatory violations or loss of customer trust.
IT Help Desks: If agents are able to resolve tickets, reconfigure systems or revoke access credentials, an incorrect action can cause outages or security risks.
Insurance Claims: If agents can directly approve or deny claims, errors can lead to financial loss, fraud, or regulatory violations.
Healthcare Administration: If agents can update patient records or schedule procedures, mistakes can compromise patient safety and violate privacy laws.
Financial Advisory: If agents can execute trades and adjust portfolios, flawed reasoning or misalignment can lead to costly or unlawful decisions.
These are not just areas of high value: they are areas of high risk. That makes them ripe for verification platforms that can simulate agent behaviour in complex, real-world environments and certify their compliance before deployment.
What Verification Looks Like
Verification by companies like Conscium will not be a single product but a layered solution. It will combine automated testing environments (to simulate workflows), LLM evaluation tools (to inspect reasoning chains), and observability platforms (to track behaviour post-deployment). It will include certification frameworks to give buyers the confidence that their agents meet safety and compliance standards.
Effective verification will answer questions like:
These are not just technical hurdles, they are business imperatives. In the near future, any enterprise deploying AI agents without a robust verification layer may face significant legal and reputational exposure.
How Verification will be introduced
The verification market will develop along familiar lines. Direct sales teams will evangelise to the largest enterprises. Channel partners like systems integrators and value-added resellers will build custom integrations. The Hyper-scalers, the cloud providers who offer AI infrastructure at scale, will incorporate verification as part of their platforms.
Just as companies once needed antivirus software, then firewalls, then zero-trust architectures, they will now need 'agent fire drills' and 'autonomy red teams.' Verification will become a board-level concern, and a prerequisite for enterprise-grade deployments.
Conclusion: Verification is trust for the age of AI agents
AI agents promise a radical leap in productivity and automation. But to unlock their potential safely, we need to build the trust layer. Verification is not a luxury: it's a necessity.
2025 is the year of the AI agent. It will also be the year of AI agent verification.