WorkWorlds: An Infrastructure for Evaluating AI Agents on Workplace Tasks

arXiv:2609.23806 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-20 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-20

Updated: 2026-09-23

Comments: 4 figures

Code: https://github.com/agent-evalscience/workworld

Project page: https://agent-evalscience.github.io

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Many knowledge-work benchmarks are constructed around individual tasks, with the context needed for each task selected together with or after the task has been specified.

Terminology

Abstract

Many knowledge-work benchmarks are constructed around individual tasks, with the context needed for each task selected together with or after the task has been specified. This design measures performance on workplace-like tasks in an environment assembled for the task. When task specification guides which context is selected, the evaluation can encode task information into the environment and pre-complete part of the information-localization work that workplace performance normally requires. We introduce WorkWorlds, an evaluation infrastructure that separates organizational state from task specification. A world first fixes a revision, date, and employee seat and materializes the organizational state that employee can access; tasks are introduced only afterward. We implement WorkWorlds in a primary synthetic pharmaceutical company with 8 measured tasks across 6 employee seats, and construct additional organizational worlds. Across 192 matched evaluations, moving from task-curated context to the full role-visible workplace reduced evidence access from 90.4% to 74.5% and criterion pass from 79.4% to 68.2%, while pass conditional on evidence access remained nearly unchanged; most of the measured difference occurred before the agent reached sufficient evidence.

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