What Deflection rate means in practice
Deflection rate is the headline metric for conversational AI in enterprise customer-contact use. It measures the percentage of inbound interactions the bot resolves without escalating to a human. The honest version of the metric nets out re-contacts: if a customer's chat is "resolved" by the bot but they then call back the same day on the same issue, that doesn't count. Industry-honest deflection rates for well-deployed sovereign chatbots in regulated industries are 50–70%; vendor-marketed numbers that ignore re-contact are commonly 85%+, which is why the procurement question to ask is "deflection net of next-7-day re-contact".
Related terms
Conversational AI →
AI systems that interact with users through natural-language dialogue — chatbots, voice agents, virtual assistants — typically combining intent classification, retrieval, and generation.
Intent classification →
The NLU step of mapping a user's free-text or speech input to one of a curated set of "intents" the system knows how to handle.
More in this category
All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.