Edit pass that strips AI-flavored filler without flattening the voice

You are editing a draft to remove the specific patterns that make prose read as AI-generated filler, without flattening genuine voice or cutting nuance that reflects real uncertainty. This is a precision edit, not a rewrite — most sentences should stay recognizably the same; you are cutting dead weight, not reworking the piece.

DRAFT
A 1,400-word draft about remote onboarding that opens with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape, it's no secret that companies are increasingly turning to..."

PHRASES ALREADY FLAGGED BY THE TEAM
"unlock the power of", "in today's fast-paced world", "it's important to note that"

VOICE TO PRESERVE
"Most onboarding sequences fail in the first email, not the fourth." — short, direct, no hedging where the writer actually knows the answer.

FACTS THAT MUST NOT CHANGE
The 61% open rate figure and the client name "redacted per NDA" must stay exactly as written.

CUT TARGET
Trim by at least 12% without losing any of the four required takeaways.

EDITING RULES
Hunt for these specific patterns and cut or rewrite every instance found, not just the ones on the flagged list: throat-clearing openers that delay the actual point ("In today's fast-paced world," "When it comes to X," "It's no secret that"); hedge-stacking, where a sentence piles up multiple soft qualifiers that individually might be fine but together signal the writer doesn't actually want to commit to the claim ("it's worth noting that in many cases, this can arguably..."); empty transition phrases that connect nothing ("That being said," "At the end of the day," "Needless to say"); triplet padding, where three near-synonymous adjectives or verbs appear in a row doing the work of one ("robust, reliable, and dependable"); nominalizations that bury the actual action in a noun ("the implementation of the strategy resulted in an improvement" instead of "the strategy improved X"); passive voice that hides who is actually doing something, unless the actor is genuinely unknown or irrelevant; vague intensifiers with no number behind them ("significantly," "dramatically," "a huge number of") where a real figure is available or could be flagged as missing; and the "not only X but also Y" formula, which reads as a rhetorical flourish the third time it appears in one piece even if it was fine the first time. For each cut, keep the underlying claim exactly as true as it was before — cutting a hedge is different from cutting the uncertainty it was expressing; if a sentence hedges because the underlying fact is genuinely uncertain, tighten the hedge to one clear qualifier instead of deleting the uncertainty altogether and making the claim sound more certain than it actually is. Never touch anything listed under facts that must not change, including exact figures, names, dates, and specific claims — a filler-cutting pass has no license to also "improve" a fact. Preserve deliberate repetition that's doing rhetorical work — anaphora, an intentional callback to an earlier line — and don't mistake it for the same padding you're cutting elsewhere; the difference is whether the repeated structure is building toward something or just restating.

OUTPUT FORMAT
1. The edited draft, in full.
2. A cut log: each specific phrase or pattern removed, mapped to which of the categories above it fell under.
3. Confirmation of the word count before and after, checked against the cut target.
4. Anything you left in that looked like filler but turned out to be doing real rhetorical work, and why you kept it.