Automation rate
The automation rate is the share of conversations an AI agent resolves completely, without handing them to a person on the team. It is expressed as a percentage of all conversations in a given period and is the most important metric for judging what an AI agent delivers in customer service.
What does the automation rate measure?
The automation rate answers a simple question: how many conversations does the AI agent finish on its own? Only conversations it resolved count. Conversations with a human handover do not. Many tools call it the resolution rate.
How do you calculate it?
Resolved conversations divided by all of the agent's conversations in the same period, times 100.
An example: an online pet supply shop has 400 conversations with its AI agent in October. The agent resolves 260 itself and hands 140 to the team. The automation rate is 65 %. At four minutes per request, that frees up a good 17 hours a month for other work.
What is a good automation rate?
That depends heavily on your requests. A shop with lots of questions about delivery times and returns reaches more than a law firm where almost every question needs individual review. As a guide: industry figures for 2025 to 2026 put it at up to 70 % of routine requests resolved without a handover. SendSeven's own support agent reached 81 % (41 conversations in the 30 days up to 12 October 2026). Your rate depends on your requests and your knowledge base.
How is it different from the containment rate?
The two metrics sound alike but measure different things. The automation rate counts resolved conversations. The containment rate counts every conversation that never reaches a person, including the ones where the customer gives up in frustration. That is why the containment rate is almost always higher and says little on its own.
How do you raise the automation rate?
- Review handovers: which questions keep landing with the team? Those answers belong in the knowledge base.
- Keep sources current: outdated prices or opening hours lead to handovers or wrong answers.
- Give a clear job: an agent with a narrowly described task resolves more than one that is supposed to do everything.
One last note: never push the rate up by making handovers harder. Customers who cannot reach a person are not resolved, they are annoyed.
Where do you see the automation rate in SendSeven?
In the overview of SendSeven AI agents with analytics, each agent shows how many conversations it handled in 30 days, how many were resolved and how many handovers there were. Under Analytics you look at 7, 30 or 90 days and export the figures as CSV.