Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.14346

Evaluating LLMs as Agentic Workflow Executors in Real-World Customer Support Skills

Abstract

Enterprise customer-support agents increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute bounded, tool-using workflows. We study this problem through the lens of Skill LLMs: specialized executors that operate within a selected skill context and must complete a narrow, stateful workflow under policy and tool constraints. We present a benchmark construction pipeline that mines recurrent workflows from real-world transcripts, converts them into structured skill descriptions, maps them to tool requirements, simulates environment state with Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible mocks, and generates multi-turn tool-using dialogues. Using this benchmark, we conduct a large-scale zero-shot evaluation of 17 language models spanning closed model families and deployment-oriented open-weight models from 1.7B to 14B parameters, each judged independently by five strong LLM judges, plus a deterministic rule-based evaluator that checks tool coverage, hallucinated tool use, and unsupported claims. We find a consistent ranking in which GPT-5.4 leads by a wide margin and QWEN3.5-9B is the strongest open-weight model (below 20B), outperforming several closed baselines under every judge. We also find that judge choice is not a negligible methodological detail: pairwise judge agreement on the pass/fail verdict averages Kappa=0.524 across 10 judge pairs. These results suggest that comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of skill execution requires judge reliability as carefully as model capability.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Gundeep Singh, Xue-Yong Fu, Karol Chang, Kevin Sanders, Shi Zong, Tania Habib, Julien Bouvier Tremblay, Shayna Gardiner, Harsh Saini, Matthias Lee, Elena Khasanova, Quinten McNamara, Shashi Bhushan TN. 2026-10-14. Evaluating LLMs as Agentic Workflow Executors in Real-World Customer Support Skills. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14346

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

AnnoCaseLaw: Legal Annotation Benchmark of Civil Negligence

Language models offer a way to scale costly, labour-intensive expert annotation, but their ability to reproduce expert judgements remains uncertain. This is particularly challenging in law, where annotators must distinguish the reasoning supporting judicial decisions from other legally relevant discussion. We present AnnoCaseLaw as a densely annotated benchmark comprising $471$ U.S. civil-negligence court opinions with more than $12,000$ expert highlights across five annotation categories. We evaluate proprietary frontier, open-weight, legal-specialised, and decision models on their ability to reproduce these annotations. Models perform better on Facts and Outcome than on Application of Law to Facts, Procedural History, and Relevant Precedents. On Application of Law to Facts, proprietary frontier models achieve the strongest balance of reasoning coverage and precision, while the open-weight model Gemma 4 achieves comparable Macro-F1 to proprietary frontier models at a fraction of the estimated inference cost. Our findings highlight the importance of evaluating annotation coverage and cost alongside aggregate scores when assessing the feasibility of automated legal annotation.

cs.CL↗

Neither Stochastic Parroting nor AGI: LLMs Solve Tasks through Context-Directed Extrapolation from Training Data Priors

This position paper argues that many behaviours framed as either "stochastic parroting" or "advanced reasoning" are better explained as context-directed extrapolation from training-data priors, and that ML and NLP research communities would benefit from evaluations that distinguish remembering and basic extrapolation from genuine application-level generalisation. Our central contribution is an actionable evaluation checklist and design patterns that make these distinctions testable in practice. Our framework posits that LLMs extrapolate from training data priors while using context to guide the model to the appropriate priors; we call this "context-directed extrapolation." Specifically, this context direction is achieved through examples in base models, leading to in-context learning, while instruction tuning allows analogous task specification via prompts rather than explicit examples. We argue that adopting this more realistic framework and controls for improving evaluation would better calibrate claims about LLM "reasoning," refocus research on how LLM performance interacts with training data and generalisability to out-of-domain tasks, and reduce miscalibration in deployment and policy decisions.

cs.CL↗

Effects of Theory of Mind and Prosocial Beliefs on Steering Human-Aligned Behaviors of LLMs in Ultimatum Games

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in simulating human behaviors and performing theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning, crucial for complex social interactions. We investigate ToM reasoning's role in aligning agentic behaviors with human norms in negotiation tasks, using the ultimatum game as our referenced task. We initialized LLM agents with different prosocial beliefs (Greedy, Fair, Selfless) and reasoning methods (chain of thought and ToM reasoning of varying levels), examining their decision-making processes and outcomes across multiple LLMs, including reasoning models like o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1 Distilled Qwen 32B. We perform 2,700 simulations to show that ToM reasoning enhances behavioral alignment with human norms, decision-making consistency, and negotiation outcomes. Consistent with prior findings, reasoning LLMs exhibit limited capability compared to ToM-enhanced LLMs, with different game roles benefiting from different ToM orders. Agents almost always chose strategies consistent with their assigned beliefs, and doing so aligned better with human norms in nearly every role, yet Greedy and Selfless agents still fell short of their norms in outcomes. Human verification further revealed that Llama 3.3 70B produces reasoning most consistent with its actions and beliefs. Our findings advance understanding of ToM's role in human-AI interaction and cooperative decision-making. The code used for our experiments can be found at https://github.com/Stealth-py/UltimatumToM.

cs.CL↗