Handoff
A handoff is the transfer of work, responsibility, or relevant information from one person, agent, team, or process to another.
Effective Conversational AI
Escalation is the transfer of a chatbot interaction to a human agent or other additional handling when the bot cannot complete the request or the user requests assistance.
- How it is used
- Routes requests needing human assistance while preserving progress made with the chatbot.
- How deep it goes
- Explains when to retry, offer another path, or transfer, and why a targeted summary improves handoff; does not detail transfer implementation.
- Examples
- Uses a claim-status dialogue ending in an agent request, an outage requiring manual processing, and a lookup with an alternative route.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform handoffs that avoid needless repetition, and diagnose escalations by conversation outcome and last step.
AI Agents in Action, Second Edition
A handoff pattern is a multi-agent design in which control of a task transfers from one agent to another without a separately coded transition.
- How it is used
- Transfers control between specialized agents in an agentic flow without coding each transition.
- How deep it goes
- Works through instructional routing and handoff connections, then adds graph visualization and typed callback monitoring.
- Examples
- Uses a research-to-planning-to-filesystem flow, a graph visualization, and a callback that logs transferred research sources.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via OpenAI Agents SDK handoffs, then inspect routing with draw_graph and Dashboard Traces.
Read how AI Agents in Action, Second Edition explains handoff →
Related concepts
- collaborationused by · Collaboration is coordinated activity in which multiple participants contribute toward a shared goal or outcome.
- x-as-a-service modealternative to · An X-as-a-service mode is an interaction or delivery model in which a provider supplies a capability as a consumable service through defined interfaces and expectations.
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