Handover to Humans
Handover is the moment your Agent Stack stops handling a conversation and a human takes over. Sometimes this is graceful — the AI gathers what it needs, summarizes, and a human picks up with full context. Sometimes it’s urgent — the customer is frustrated and the AI gets out of the way. Either way, the Handover tab is where you configure both ends of that handoff.
The three sub-tabs
The Handover tab has three sub-tabs that walk you through the lifecycle of a handover:
- Triggers — Whether handover is allowed at all, and what triggers it
- Prerequisites — The information the AI must collect from the customer before handing off
- Delivery — Who picks up, and what happens outside opening hours
Disabling handover at the Triggers level (setting handover mode to “never”) greys out the other two sub-tabs — they only matter once handover is allowed.
Handover modes
A stack can be configured with one of three handover modes (full reference: handover modes):
- never — the stack never hands off. Conversations either resolve in-AI or the customer gives up. Rare; only sensible for stacks that handle a single closed task with no human-help fallback.
- by_description — the AI decides when handover is needed based on its trigger rules (frustration, legal threat, escalation request, stall) and routes to a team derived from the conversation context. The default for most stacks.
- explicit_team — handover always goes to one specific team you choose. Use this when only one team handles all human-needed cases for this stack.
Prerequisites — gather before you handoff
Prerequisites are the questions the AI must have answers to before handing off. Each prerequisite has:
- A field — either a conversation field or a contact field. The answer is saved into that field.
- An ask prompt — what the AI says to the customer to collect it.
- A condition mode —
always(always required) orwhen(required only when a stated condition is met). - A sort order — prerequisites are checked in order.
A typical setup: a billing stack might require the customer’s account email and the invoice number before handoff. The AI checks each prerequisite, asks for anything missing, and only triggers handover once everything applicable is collected. If the customer can’t or won’t provide a value, the orchestrator may hand off anyway under risk-escalation logic — prerequisites are best-effort.
Outside opening hours
The Delivery tab includes opening-hours behavior. When Check opening hours is on and the team is closed, the AI offers one or more outside-hours options:
- Email follow-up — Asks for an email and confirms a reply will come during business hours (default: on)
- Close and return — Closes the conversation cleanly with instructions to reopen during hours
- Ask confirmation — Confirms the customer still wants to wait before queueing
Email follow-up is on by default because it’s the most useful immediate option for outside-hours customers. The other two are off by default and additive.
Handover instructions
The Delivery tab also has a free-form Handover instructions field — extra context the AI uses to decide how to hand off and what to put in the handoff pack. Examples: “Mention if the customer has been a customer for over 5 years,” or “Always tell the customer the human’s first name.”
What the human picks up
When handover triggers, the conversation moves out of the Alia tab and into the chosen team’s queue. The handoff pack (prepared by the handoff infrastructure agent) is attached to the conversation: a summary of what happened, the customer’s sentiment, key details collected during prerequisites, and suggestions for next steps. The human picks up with all of that available, not from scratch.