Same Feedback, Different Answer: Measuring Run-to-Run Instability in Frontier-Model Customer Feedback Analysis

Abstract

AI agents are increasingly being programmed to automate knowledge work over large collections of unstructured data. Such automation requires repeatability: when the underlying evidence is unchanged, the agent's categories, priorities, and counts should not shift materially between runs, even if each individual answer appears plausible. We introduce a repeat-run evaluation framework that aligns semantically equivalent categories and focuses on two operating metrics: theme churn, the normalized change in the returned category set, and volume disagreement, the change in counts for categories that persist. We evaluate three recurring customer-feedback tasks across eight frontier models, corpus sizes from 100 to 5,000 records, multiple prompts, and three execution designs: raw generation, taxonomy-free hierarchical decomposition, and a taxonomy-grounded agent (TGA) using persistent themes, subthemes, and record-level predictions. With Claude Opus 4.8 and the 1,000-record corpus fixed, TGA reduces theme churn by 86--88% relative to both raw generation and hierarchical decomposition, while matched-theme volumes have zero disagreement. The taxonomy-grounded agent is more stable than every raw model in the screen, remains more stable at each corpus size, and keeps this advantage when theme matching is made stricter or looser. Although evaluated on customer feedback, the framework targets repeated synthesis of unstructured corpora more broadly, including financial reports, legal documents, incident records, and scientific literature. Overall, these results show that taxonomy grounding produces more consistent and repeatable outputs for recurring knowledge work.