The One Latency Metric That Tells You If Your AI Agent Is Actually Smart

The moment a new term enters a conversation, most AI agents become briefly “blind.” During this misalignment window, retrieval fails, the model hedges with vague answers, and users feel subtle distance. The real reliability signal isn’t model size or prompting tricks — it’s how fast the agent adapts to new vocabulary. Shrink that window, and trust rises; let it linger, and the agent feels outdated in real time.