Fallback

Bot handoff is the transfer of a live conversation from an automated agent to a human, ideally with the full transcript and any collected context attached. A clean handoff prevents the customer from repeating information, which is the most common complaint recorded about automated support experiences.

Guardrails are the policy, tone, and action limits an AI agent is not permitted to cross, such as refusing to issue refunds above a threshold or to discuss topics outside its remit. Guardrails are enforced in the system rather than merely requested in the prompt.

A hallucination is a fluent but unsupported answer produced when a model is not grounded in real data. In customer service the risk is specific: an invented policy, price, or delivery date reads as authoritative to the customer and creates a commitment the business never made.

Grounding is the practice of constraining an AI agent’s answers to approved knowledge sources and live system data rather than to the model’s own training. Grounding is the main defence against hallucination, and it is what makes an AI answer auditable back to a specific document or record.