# Accepted job

Work that a responsible person or system has judged complete against the result that was promised.

Source: https://aecon.ai/glossary/accepted-job
Updated: 2026-09-15

## In practice

A competitor briefing is delivered with every required section present and each material claim sourced; the reviewing analyst records acceptance, and the job becomes billable.

## The distinction

Delivery is not acceptance, and a provider's `success` or `completed` status is not acceptance either. Acceptance is a business decision made against a stated test by someone entitled to make it.

## The events a market can count

Agent activity produces many countable events. They sit at different distances from economic value.

| Event | What it records | What it leaves open |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Tool call | An operation was attempted | Whether it served a job, or was a retry |
| Tokens | Infrastructure was consumed | Whether the output was useful |
| Payment | Value moved | Whether anything was delivered |
| Delivery | A result was made available | Whether it met the promise |
| **Acceptance** | A responsible party judged the result complete | Cost, rework and whether the customer returns |

An economy is not counted in tool calls, tokens, endpoints or pilots. It is counted in work somebody accepted and paid for. That is why acceptance is the useful endpoint: it is the first event in the chain that a buyer, a supplier and a finance system all recognise as the same thing.

## What an acceptance record contains

Acceptance needs a test written before the work starts, a named reviewer or deterministic rule, a decision, a timestamp and a reason when the answer is no.

Partial acceptance and rework are separate events, not rounding. A pilot with twenty eligible jobs, eighteen deliveries and fifteen first-pass acceptances has a 75 per cent first-pass rate — not 90 per cent success because eighteen outputs appeared. The five corrected jobs still consumed labour and still bear on whether the workflow should scale.

## Acceptance does not settle everything

A job can be accepted and still be unprofitable once retries, review minutes, support and integration maintenance are counted. It can be accepted by a buyer and still affect somebody who was never asked.

Read the accepted-job count beside cost per accepted job, human minutes per accepted job, incident severity and repeat use. One number in isolation is a metric; the set is a business.

## Sources & context

- [Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models](https://metr.org/time-horizons/) — METR, 2026. METR cautions that its task suite does not measure general real-world autonomy, which is why benchmark completion and accepted work are different claims. Checked 2026-09-13.
- [Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice](https://www.anthropic.com/research/measuring-agent-autonomy) — Anthropic, February 2026. Notes that product telemetry may not capture downstream human checking, so provider-side success can overstate completed work. Checked 2026-09-13.

## Related reading

- [Delegated work](https://aecon.ai/glossary/delegated-work)
- [Task](https://aecon.ai/glossary#task)
- [Service](https://aecon.ai/glossary#service)
- [Agentic economy](https://aecon.ai/glossary/agentic-economy)