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Handoff is the one seam in this product where a worse vendor’s incentives would show. It is the single moment a company billing for effort rather than outcomes is tempted to charge for a job it did not finish.

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What actually happens

When the AI agent cannot finish, it hands the conversation to a human rather than guessing or stalling. Two things happen at once:
1

The conversation reopens and gets routed normally

It does not sit in an unassigned pile waiting to be noticed. It goes through the same assignment path as any other open conversation — see Assignment policies — so it lands with whoever is actually next in line.
2

The human inherits the whole thread, not a blank one

Because Tied threads by person rather than by ticket, the agent picking this up sees everything the AI agent already tried, on any channel, in order — not a summary standing in for the original. See Inbox for why that is the default rather than a feature.

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Once a person is in the thread, the AI agent steps back

While a human owns the conversation and is actually on shift, the AI agent stops replying to the customer. It already said someone was coming; continuing to answer over that person’s head would make that untrue, and would hand the human a conversation that kept moving without them. Outside those hours, there is nobody yet to hand off to — so rather than leaving the customer stuck until morning, the AI agent keeps answering. The hours it checks are the same ones configured in Teams and business hours.
This only happens if the inbox’s master working-hours switch is on — and it defaults to off. With the switch off, Tied treats the inbox as staffed around the clock, so the off-hours branch above never runs, no matter what the weekly schedule says. If you are relying on the AI agent to keep answering outside your team’s actual hours, confirm that switch is on for the inbox first — see Teams and business hours.

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The billing consequence

Two outcomes: an AI resolution confirmed by a positive signal bills one fee; a handoff to a human bills nothing. Two outcomes: an AI resolution confirmed by a positive signal bills one fee; a handoff to a human bills nothing.
Handoff is free. Not a reduced charge, not a routing fee, not a partial-credit charge. Zero. And if a human sends a message into that conversation before the resolution is confirmed, the resolution is not billable at all (once confirmed, the fee is locked, though a reopen or a negative survey can still cancel it) — see What counts as a resolution.
The AI agent will often do real work before handing off — it reads the account, gathers context, and leaves that summary in the thread so the human starts informed rather than cold. That work genuinely saves your team time, and Tied does not charge for it. The reasoning is deliberate: the moment a vendor can bill for handing off, that vendor is paid for giving up, and every incentive quietly bends toward escalating early and often. Tied would rather be paid only when the AI agent actually finishes the job, and paid nothing when it does not — so the incentive and your interest point in the same direction instead of opposite ones. This is also why a human agent sending a message is its own, separate non-billable signal, not just “handoff is free” applying twice. Once a person is in the thread before the resolution is confirmed, that resolution is not the AI agent’s to bill, though a confirmed fee stays locked (a reopen or a negative survey can still cancel it). See Assisted routing is free.

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Next

What counts as a resolution

The four signal tiers, and why a human message is always Tier 0.

AI agents

What the agent can do before it ever reaches this point.