Escalation & Handoff
The AI Assistant’s core rule: when in doubt, escalate — never fabricate. Every AI-handled conversation ends with either a grounded answer or a clean handoff to your team. There’s never a dead end.
The three triggers
What causes an escalation:
- ✓The AI can't answer- No configured tool has the information, or a tool call returns nothing useful. The AI does not guess — it hands off instead.
- âś“The visitor asks for a human- Either by typing something like "talk to a person", or by clicking the persistent "Talk to a human" button in the widget header.
- âś“A technical failure- A tool call errors out, times out, or the AI request itself fails. The visitor is never left waiting on a broken request.
A monthly AI usage quota running out is treated the same way — the assistant escalates rather than going silent.
What the visitor sees
The moment an escalation happens, the visitor gets an immediate, friendly message confirming they’re now in the human queue — for example:
“I wasn’t able to fully answer that, so I’m connecting you with someone from our team. You’re in the queue — an operator will be with you shortly.”
If they asked for a human directly, the copy reflects that instead:
“Sure — connecting you with a team member now. You’re in the queue; someone will join shortly.”
From here, the conversation behaves exactly like a normal queued conversation — any available operator can pick it up.
Asking for a human, explicitly
Two ways a visitor can request a human at any time:
- Click “Talk to a human” — shown in the chat widget header whenever the AI assistant is active for your application. It’s disabled once a human is already involved, since there’s nothing left to escalate. When the AI assistant is off, the button is hidden entirely: those conversations already go straight to your team, so there is nothing to escalate from.
- Programmatically, via the SDK — if you’re building a custom UI on top of
the SDK, call
requestHuman():
const chat = getSdkApi();
await chat.requestHuman();See SDK Methods for the full method reference.
What operators see
When a conversation escalates, it lands in your team’s queue in real time — the same way a brand-new conversation would. To help your team pick up smoothly:
- The conversation is flagged as escalated, with the reason (couldn’t answer, visitor requested, or a technical failure).
- A short AI handoff summary is generated automatically, giving the operator context on what the visitor already asked and what the AI already tried — so they don’t have to scroll back through the whole thread cold.
- Taking over is the same “Accept” action used for any pending conversation. There’s no separate “take over from AI” button — clicking Accept assigns the conversation to that operator and the AI stops responding to it immediately.
No half-measures
Once an operator accepts, the AI will never reply to that conversation again, even if a message the visitor sent right before handoff is still being processed.