​Your AI Voice Agent Passed Its Lab Test, Will It Survive In The Wild?

Satish Barot is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Klearcom. He leads the company’s product innovation and technical strategy.

Many of the AI voice agent testing approaches happen in a testing lab, under ideal conditions that real customers calling in the wild rarely (if ever) enjoy.

Speech recognition, voice quality and latency benchmarks usually run on clean audio over direct connections, while a real caller reaches the agent over a local carrier, through a mobile codec and from a noisy street. Those conditions show up in the wild, when you call the deployed agent from inside the market it serves. In AssemblyAI’s 2026 survey of more than 450 builders, 82.5% of them felt confident building these agents, but 75% struggled with technical reliability barriers in production.

I lead engineering at a company that tests enterprise numbers and AI voice agents from inside more than 100 countries, so I have a stake here. In recent months, our team has heard remarkably consistent requests from enterprises preparing to put voice AI agents on their customer-facing numbers. They are ready to roll their agents out, but without the confidence that they will behave or perform as instructed.

What Enterprises Are Telling Us

A global retailer we spoke with is piloting an agent in one country before taking it to dozens more, in several languages. Their QA lead tests it by placing calls by hand, their security team runs its own prompt injection tests alongside and callers have already reported waiting up to five seconds for a reply. Their biggest worry was that any change to the prompt can shift how the agent behaves, so they were knowingly accepting risk because nobody could rerun every scenario after each release.

Where The Lab And The Wild Part Ways

What We Built, And Where It Stops

What To Test Before You Trust A Lab Result

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?