Amazon says Rufus drove $12 billion in "incremental" sales. That word carries weight. It means purchases that wouldn't have happened otherwise, a counterfactual no one can observe directly. OpenAI claims Frontier returns "90% more time" to client teams without explaining what counts as time or what the baseline was. Gartner's 40% enterprise adoption figure? Explicitly labeled a best-case scenario, not a forecast.
When market projections span $52 billion to $236 billion by 2030-2034, the variance isn't just methodological. It's definitional chaos about what qualifies as an agent versus what's automation with better marketing.