Your support agent frequently fails to complete tasks when third-party tools return unexpected formats.

At production scale, Option A preserves separability between reasoning, state, tools, and runtime operations. The selected option specifically A states “Add robust schema validation and exception handling for all tool outputs”, which matches the operational requirement rather than a superficial wording match. Schema validation and exception handling make unexpected tool outputs explicit. Reducing tools or retraining does not fix bad payload handling. Operationally, the design depends on a plugin-style execution layer that keeps external systems outside the model while still letting the agent invoke them deterministically. For a production build, a production NVIDIA deployment can put tool latency, errors, and schema validation into traces, then tune the workflow without changing the foundation model. The losing choices mostly optimize for short-term convenience; static or unvalidated integration choices cannot withstand transient outages, rate limits, malformed responses, or schema drift. It also creates clean evidence for audits, incident review, and root-cause analysis when behavior drifts. Schema validation, typed return objects, and trace IDs also make post-incident debugging realistic when a third-party dependency changes behavior.