Handing over the Keys: Escalation

An AI agent should be humble. If it's been talking to a user for 10 minutes and the user is getting angry or the agent doesn't have the right tools, it must Escalate the issue to a human.

1. Triggering Escalation

An agent can escalate based on:

• Keywords: "I want to talk to a person" or "Manager."
• Sentiment: Recognizing anger or frustration in the user's tone.
• Confidence: When the Knowledge Base search returns 0 results for the 3rd time in a row.

2. The Handoff Package

When an AI hands off to a human, it shouldn't just disappear. It should provide a Summary of the conversation so the human doesn't have to read the whole transcript.

# Pseudo-code for an Escalation Tool
def escalate_to_human(transcript):
    summary = model.summarize(transcript) # Create a quick Recap
    notify_human_operator(summary, transcript)
    return "I am connecting you to a human specialist now. They have a summary of our chat."

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3. Visualizing the Handoff

graph LR
    User[Angry User] --> A[Agent]
    A --> S{Sentiment Analysis}
    S -->|Frustrated| E[Escalate]
    E --> Pack[Context Package: Summary + Log]
    Pack --> H[Human Operator Dashboard]

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💡 Guidance for Learners

Escalation is a Safety Valve. It protects your brand reputation. It's better to admit "I don't know" and bring in a person than to keep guessing and alienating the customer.

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Summary

• Escalation is the process of transferring an AI task to a person.
• Triggers include anger, keywords, or systemic failure.
• Summary Handoffs save time for the human operator.
• Good escalation design improves the User Experience (UX).