went live with an AI support bot last january. connected it to our help center, trained it on our top 12 ticket types, gave it 6 weeks to learn. by month 3 we were at 6% deflection. month 8 we hit 8% and stalled. our account manager kept sending benchmark decks showing 7-12% was "typical for complex B2B" and for a while we just believed it. we even renewed because the deflection numbers looked fine relative to whatever PDFs he was sending over. what actually cracked it open was a f...