Invisible attrition sounds like noise. Some agents stall, some sessions end without a conversion, and it all averages out. It doesn’t. It lands on your most profitable customers first.
Start with how failure compounds. A multi-step flow only succeeds if every step does. Take an illustrative 95% per step: five steps finish about 77% of the time, ten steps about 60%. A human patches the ambiguous step with context. An agent has no context to patch it with, so every step carries real risk.
Now look at where your margin sits. Configurators, quotes, multi-step checkout, authentication, anything with conditional fields. Those flows have the most steps, and they exist because what’s behind them is complex enough to be worth more. Simple flows are simple because the thing behind them is cheap.
So the flows most likely to fail are the flows that earn the most. The failure curve and the margin curve point the same way.
What happens at the failure matters too. Kevin Indig ran agent tasks against 100 B2B products, five runs each. When the agent hit an access error, it fell back to third-party sources 77% of the time. Without one, 17%. The agent doesn’t retry and doesn’t call anyone. It answers from someone else’s version of you.
Nothing flags it. No ticket, no error in your logs that reads as a loss. The expensive purchase that never completed gets averaged with the cheap flows where agents succeed, and the blended number looks healthy because the flows that work are the ones that earn least.
None of this depends on volume. Even a small share of agent traffic is skewed toward the flows where losing it costs the most.
Before you look at blended conversion, rank your flows by margin, then rank them by number of steps. Where the two lists overlap is where your invisible attrition concentrates. That overlap is the first place to look, and the last place a dashboard will show it.