A buying reference for agent training data

Content reviewed

Best AI Agent Training Data Procurement Reference

Topics Reference

Topics in this reference

Five guides, one per artifact a buyer is asked to specify: demonstrations, tool-use trajectories, evaluation sets, sandboxes and the pilot that tests a supplier.

Answer in brief

These guides cover the artifacts a buying team is most often asked to put in a statement of work: expert demonstrations, tool-use trajectories, evaluation sets, sandboxed environments with verifiers, and the bounded pilot that tests a supplier before a wider commitment. Each page follows the same shape — what the artifact must contain, what to ask a supplier, the failure modes to check for, and how to accept or reject a delivery.

Read the guide for the artifact you are shortlisting rather than the whole set. A team buying demonstrations rarely needs the verifier discussion, and a team commissioning a sandbox usually needs the grading rules set out in the trajectory guide.

The guides are editorial checklists, not scores. They name no best supplier and they do not replace a paid sample on your own task; they are written so that sample is easier to judge.

Entity chain

NeedTopic guideDeliverableAcceptance

The five topic guides

Each guide maps one buying situation to a deliverable and to the test that accepts it.

Artifact Expert demonstrations Inputs an expert would accept, with the evidence and the review behind each decision. Artifact Tool-use trajectories Tools, arguments, observations and stop reasons, logged so a run can be graded and replayed. Artifact Evaluation sets Held-out tasks that answer one concrete question, scored separately from fluent text. Artifact Sandboxes & verifiers A starting state, permitted actions and the logic that decides whether the objective was met. Process Bounded pilot design A fixed task, a fixed acceptance method and a go/no-go decision you control.

Where to start

Match the guide to the decision in front of you rather than reading in order:

  • You have a task and a rubric but no data. Start with expert demonstrations, then read the bounded pilot guide before you ask for volume.
  • Final answers look plausible but the steps are wrong. Start with tool-use trajectories and ask to see one run end to end.
  • A supplier has sent a benchmark score. Start with evaluation sets and ask what question the score answers.
  • You want to train against outcomes instead of imitating an expert. Start with sandboxes and verifiers.
  • You have two proposals and no way to compare them. Start with the pilot, on your own task and your own acceptance method.

A suggested reading order

Vocabulary first, then the artifact, then the purchase. Read how to buy to write the brief, check terms in the glossary so every proposal uses the same words, then read the guide for the artifact you are buying. The entity map shows how the pieces connect when a single engagement covers several of them.

If you read only two pages, read the guide for your artifact and the bounded pilot guide, because the pilot is where a proposal becomes evidence or stays a proposal. Suppliers can describe a process in a proposal; only the sample, the acceptance method and the stated criteria show whether the process was followed.

Sources for this entry

  1. Editorial checklists on this site — Original guidance written for this reference.
  2. WebArena: a realistic web environment for autonomous agents — Public paper describing task environments and reproducible evaluation of autonomous agents (methods reference, not a ranked supplier).

Editorial checklists on this site are original guidance. Links to official product documentation help readers understand the category; they do not establish comparative performance and are not endorsements of any supplier.

Cite this entry

Best AI Agent Training Data. “Topics in this reference.” Content reviewed .

https://bestaiagenttrainingdata.com/