AR · 2026-07-28
Somebody claims 93% autonomous resolution. Here is what that number can hide.
Vendors publish autonomy rates between 30% and 93%. The range is that wide because they are not measuring the same thing.
Search for AI customer support and you will be told, on the same page of results, that AI resolves 93% of tickets and that it resolves 30% of them. Both numbers are published by credible parties. Neither is lying. They are measuring different things, and the difference is where your money goes.
OpenAI's case study on MavenAGI cites 93% of customer support questions answered autonomously and a 60% reduction in time to resolve. Intercom has publicly described seeing 30-50% of conversations resolved by AI. That is a threefold gap between vendors selling into the same buyer.
Three different things get called the same word
The gap is not performance. It is definitional. There are at least three distinct events that get reported as one metric:
- Answered — the AI produced a reply. Says nothing about whether it was right.
- Deflected — the conversation did not reach a human. Includes the customer giving up and leaving.
- Resolved — the customer's problem was actually solved, ideally confirmed by the customer.
A platform reporting 93% on the first definition and one reporting 35% on the third could be performing identically. You cannot tell from the marketing page, and in most cases you cannot tell from the sales deck either.
Why deflection is the number vendors prefer
Deflection is larger, easier to measure, and does not require asking the customer anything. It also counts your worst outcomes as wins. A customer who asks a question, gets a useless answer, gives up and never contacts you again is a deflection. So is a customer who churns quietly. Nothing in the metric distinguishes them from a genuine success.
“Deflection rate? Most platforms optimize for this. Resolution rate...”— Text Inc, SaaS buyer's guide 2026
The industry's own buyer guides say this out loud. It still shows up as the headline number on nearly every vendor site.
This is not only a measurement problem. It is a billing problem.
Where a platform bills per resolution, the definition sets your invoice. Intercom's Fin publishes $0.99 per resolution. Fini publishes $0.69. Sierra is reported at roughly $1.50, negotiated rather than published.
| Platform | Published rate | Model |
|---|---|---|
| Fini | $0.69 | Per resolution |
| Fin by Intercom | $0.99 | Per resolution |
| Sierra | ~$1.50 (reported) | Per resolved interaction |
| Zendesk | ~$55/seat + add-ons | Per seat |
Ranked on rate alone, Fini wins. But a platform that bills when the customer stops replying will charge you for abandonment, and a platform that bills only on confirmed resolution will not. The cheaper rate can produce the larger bill. Comparing the numbers without the definitions behind them is not a comparison.
What to ask instead
Four questions, in this order. They take about ten minutes on a sales call and they are worth more than any benchmark you will be shown.
- What specific event triggers your headline autonomy number? Get it in writing.
- What event triggers a billable resolution? These are frequently not the same event.
- What is your resolution rate confirmed by the customer, not inferred? Vendors who have this number will give it to you. Vendors who deflect the question have answered it.
- What happens to the metric when the customer abandons mid-conversation? Success, failure, or excluded?
The fourth question is the one that produces the most revealing silences.
We are reading every vendor's published billing and metric definitions and will publish them side by side. Until that is finished, this post deliberately does not summarise any individual vendor's definition second-hand — doing so would be exactly the unsourced claim it is arguing against.
The honest summary
A 93% autonomy figure is not necessarily inflated and a 35% figure is not necessarily worse. Without the definition attached, neither number carries information. Treat any autonomy claim without a stated measurement event as marketing, including the flattering ones, and especially the ones that appear alongside a per-resolution price.
SOURCES
WRITTEN BY AR · UPDATED 2026-07-28
I run the testing here. Every platform on this site gets the same ticket set, the same escalation cases, and the same billing period — and I publish the invoice, not the marketing number. Where I have not tested something, the page says so.