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Handoff to human agents

Handoff to human agents

Handoff is how the AI passes a conversation to your human team — with context, in the right inbox, with the customer informed. Handoffs are the safety valve of the AI-first model.

When the AI hands off

The AI escalates when any of these occur:

  1. Confidence below threshold — the question isn't answerable from your content at the configured confidence level.

  2. Customer requests a human — the visitor used "Talk to a person" (or clearly asked for one).

  3. Same-issue follow-up limit reached — the AI has used its configured number of follow-ups on the same problem (see Stuck detection).

  4. Hard escalation category — profanity, PII, or safety topics (see Escalation rules).

  5. After hours — a handoff-triggering event occurs outside your business hours; the conversation queues for when the team returns.

What happens mechanically

  1. The conversation is marked as waiting for a human (or queued for business hours if it happens outside your schedule).

  2. The customer sees your escalation message — Default, Team busy, or After hours copy from AI Assistant settings.

  3. The conversation lands in the handoff destination inbox per Routing & Assignment settings, either unassigned or auto-assigned via the inbox's assignment mode.

  4. System events in the thread record the escalation ("Escalated by AI"), so the history stays clear.

  5. The AI stops answering; the conversation shows the "Escalated by AI" badge and appears in the destination team's queues.

What the human sees

The handoff context preserves the customer's goal: what they asked, what the AI tried, and what remains unresolved. Combined with the thread history and the customer profile panel, an agent can pick up without re-asking questions the customer already answered.

Taking over

Any agent can take over an AI-handled conversation at any moment — even before escalation:

  • Replying as a human sets human takeover for the conversation; the AI steps aside immediately.

  • Takeover wins over all AI states: badges switch to human ownership.

Handoff assignment settings

In Settings → Inboxes & Routing → Routing & Assignment:

  • Destination inbox — Shared Inbox or a specific team inbox.

  • Assignment behavior — leave unassigned (someone picks it up) or assign automatically (round-robin over the inbox's members).

Choose a destination your team actually watches; an unassigned handoff in an inbox nobody monitors is a silent failure mode.

After the handoff

  • The conversation is now a normal human conversation: reply, tag, resolve as usual.

  • If the customer's next message is a brand-new problem, the pipeline can re-engage AI for that new turn (the same-issue counter restarts).

  • AI-handled conversations that a human resolved are recorded as human-resolved and appear in Resolved; AI-resolved ones appear in AI Resolved.

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