5 min read

Knowing when to hand over: escalation rules for AI assistants

A practical set of rules for deciding what an assistant answers and what it passes to a person.

An assistant that tries to answer everything will eventually answer something wrongly. The most useful assistants are confident about a small set of approved topics and quick to pass everything else to a person.

Answer only from approved knowledge

Give the assistant a written set of answers you are happy to stand behind. When a question falls outside them, the right reply is an honest handover, not a guess.

Always hand over when

• The customer asks for a person.
• The question involves money owed, refunds, complaints or legal matters.
• Someone describes an emergency or a safety risk.
• The answer would require a promise about price, time or outcome that is not in the approved list.
• The assistant has misunderstood twice in a row.

Make the handover useful

A handover should carry the whole conversation, the details already collected and the reason it was escalated. Your team should be able to reply without reading back through the thread.

Test the boundaries on purpose

Before going live, ask questions the assistant should not answer: an unusual price, a complaint, an instruction hidden inside a pasted document. Check that each one is handed over. Repeat the tests whenever the knowledge changes.