Orchestrator States Reference
There is no orchestrator state machine. The orchestrator decides afresh on every customer turn which specialist to invoke, whether to reply itself, or whether to hand over; nothing is carried between turns as a “state” you could look up. The old per-conversation state machine — with its triaged / stalled / risk / handover_pending steps — was removed from the product, along with the tables and settings behind it.
What Atender does keep per conversation is much smaller, and it is worth knowing because it explains what shows up in the Alia tab.
What is actually tracked
When a stack first picks up a conversation, Atender writes one assignment row linking that conversation to that stack. It carries three things:
- Stack — Which Agent Stack owns the conversation. Set once, when the conversation is first routed.
- Status —
activeorsuspended. Onlyactiveconversations count as AI-handled. - Current specialist — The specialist the orchestrator invoked most recently. Informational — it does not constrain the next turn.
There is no state for “stalled”, “at risk” or “handing off”. Those were removed with the state machine.
What moves the assignment between active and suspended
- (none) —
active— The first message routes to a stack. The channel’s chosen stack is used if it is enabled; otherwise the conversation falls through to the tenant’s default stack. active—suspended— A human takes the conversation over, or the conversation reaches a terminal status (Done or Archived).suspended—active— The conversation is reopened while it is Active or Snoozed.
A reopened conversation that a human had taken over comes back as active, but the separate AI kill switch on the conversation stays set, so it is still excluded from the AI-handled counts and from the Alia tab.
What you can tune
Nothing here. Stall threshold, risk auto-escalation, check interval and handoff mode were settings of the removed state machine and no longer exist. The one orchestrator setting a stack owns is its extra routing rules — see The orchestrator.
How this relates to conversation status
The conversation status is the inbox lifecycle (Active / Snoozed / Done / Archived) and is what your team sees in the conversation list. The assignment status above is separate and internal: it decides whether the conversation is treated as AI-handled at all. The Alia tab filters on the ordinary conversation statuses — its picker offers Active, Done and Archived — and never exposes an AI-internal state.