What is straight-through rate for AI agents?
Carlos Lebre Ribeiro ·
Straight-through rate is the share of an AI agent’s decisions that execute with no person involved and stay correct. It tells you how much of a workflow an agent really runs on its own.
How to measure it
Take a period and count the decisions the agent made. Count the ones that executed with no person involved. Then remove any that a person later overturned. The rate is what is left, divided by the total.
The last step matters. Without it, the number rises when an agent simply stops asking for help, which is the failure you want to catch.
Two numbers that go with it
- Pilot to production: the weeks from a working pilot to an agent Legal lets run on real customers.
- Decisions per euro: model, infrastructure and review cost, divided by the decisions that went through.
Why it matters for cost
Most agent cost hides in the decisions a person re-checks by hand. As an example, 20,000 decisions a month with 30% re-checked at four minutes each is 400 review hours. At €45 an hour, that is €18,000 a month. Our ROI calculator works it out from your own numbers.
Watch it when the model changes
A cheaper model moves the point where an agent hands off to a person. Measure straight-through rate before and after any switch, per workflow. More on this in what changes when you change the model.