In plain words: Instead of just scanning skill packages for structure and security, this runs the same enterprise tasks with and without each skill to measure how much it helps. Across 947 paired trials, the skill helped in 72.8% of cases, which document checks cannot see.
Abstract
Enterprise agent programs are moving from prototypes into production, where reusable skills, tools, and workflow packages must be reviewed with evidence rather than prose. Current gates often scan these artifacts for structure, style, and security, but they do not answer the deployment question: does the capability package help a live agent complete enterprise tasks under the same model, sandbox, and grading policy? We present ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a repository-native framework for evaluating skills and product capability packages as executable agent artifacts. ACES runs paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizes trajectories into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), grades six default runtime metrics, and reports Skill Lift: the target skill's added value for a fixed task, harness, workspace, and scorer. The same protocol supports product-owned task suites that compare baseline, skill, bundle, team-skill, and plugin targets. On 145 real skills from internal enterprise repositories and public catalogs, scan-only gates surface useful authoring issues but measure complementary facets (structural versus LLM-judge Spearman $ρ= 0.14$). Across 947 scored paired cases from 58 of 64 production skills and four primary harnesses, mean composite Skill Lift is 0.2134 (95\% paired-case CI [0.1967, 0.2301]); mean outcome-only lift, the average of accuracy and goal accuracy, is 0.1799. Composite lift is positive in 72.8\% of paired cases. The largest process-metric gains appear in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency---signals about discovery, routing, workflow following, and tool use that document scans cannot observe. An open-source implementation of the methodology is available in NVIDIA SkillEvaluator.
Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, Jean-Francois Puget, Roshni Malani, Meghana Puvvadi, Moshe Abramovitch, Mohit Gupta, Rama Akkiraju, Subodh Prabhu, Yogesh Dangi, Wei Luo, Seong Hee Lee
arXiv:2608.20614 · cs.AI · submitted Aug 20, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 15 pages. Extended preprint incorporating versions accepted at Agent Skills '26 (ACM CAIS 2026) and the KDD 2026 Workshop on Enterprise AI Agents: From Prototypes to Production (oral presentation). Open-source implementation: https://github.com/NVIDIA/SkillEvaluator