When the AI hands off to your team

A good assistant knows when to stop. The AI assistant hands a conversation to your team whenever it cannot answer from your knowledge or the customer needs a person. This page explains when that happens, what follows, and how agents take over or give the conversation back.

When it hands off

What happens next

1. The customer gets the assistant's own last message, or your Hand-off phrase ("Mình sẽ chuyển bạn tới nhân viên hỗ trợ ngay nhé." by default; the English phrase goes to customers whose language is English).
2. Your agents see a private note in the conversation with the reason and a one or two sentence summary of what the customer wants, so nobody has to scroll back.
3. The conversation is routed by your distribution rules, exactly like a new conversation. A situation can instead hand it to a specific agent.
4. If nobody is online, the conversation is set to pending and your team is notified by email, as for any message that arrives while nobody is around.
5. Workflows that start on The AI hands off to an agent run, and a webhook event is sent to your systems if you use them. See Workflows and the developer hub.

From then on, the assistant stays quiet in that conversation. If After a hand-off, keep suggesting replies to the agent is on, it keeps writing suggestions for the agent while someone is online.

In the inbox

A banner above the conversation tells agents what the AI is doing:

• While the AI is answering: "The AI assistant is answering this conversation." Click Stop AI to take over. The assistant and your flows stay silent in this conversation until someone resumes them.
• After a hand-off: "The AI assistant handed this conversation to a human." It stays quiet until you resume it or resolve the conversation.
• Click Resume AI to give the conversation back to the assistant. Its reply count starts again from zero.

Assigning the conversation to a person also silences the assistant: it never answers in a conversation a person owns.

Suggested replies

When the assistant drafts instead of answering, an AI suggestion appears above the composer. Click Insert to put it in the composer, edit it and send it, or Discard to dismiss it. When the knowledge does not cover the question, the suggestion says honestly that the team will check and follow up.

When the customer comes back

If a handed-off conversation is resolved and the customer writes again later, the assistant answers again with a fresh reply count.

Make it hand off less often, or more

• Too many not_in_knowledge: answer the questions in Unanswered questions and they become part of the knowledge. See Unanswered questions.
• Too many max_turns: raise Max assistant replies before hand-off on the Assistant tab, up to 20.
• You want a person in certain cases (wholesale orders, angry customers, a VIP channel): add a situation with Hand off to an agent or Bring in an agent to follow along (the AI keeps replying).
• You want it never to hand off outside office hours: the Ngoài giờ làm việc situation template tells it to keep answering and collect a phone number instead.