OpenEnv in Practice: Evaluating Tool-Using Agents in Real-World Environments

OpenEnv, developed by Meta and Hugging Face, is an open-source framework aimed at evaluating AI agents in real-world environments rather than simulations, addressing the gap between research success and production reliability. It offers a standardized way for agents to interact with real tools and workflows through a gym-oriented API, enabling consistent evaluation across domains. A significant part of this initiative includes the Calendar Gym, a production-grade environment created by Turing, which serves as a complex benchmark for testing agents' abilities in handling realistic constraints such as access control, temporal reasoning, and multi-agent coordination. The findings from evaluating agents in this environment highlight challenges like multi-step reasoning and ambiguity resolution, revealing that while agents perform well on individual tasks, they struggle with longer, more complex workflows. These insights emphasize the need for frameworks that test permissions, partial observability, and multi-step workflows together to improve agent reliability in production settings.