> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tied.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# AI-to-human handoff
> What triggers escalation and what the human receives.
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.
## 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:
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](/automation/assignment)
— so it lands with whoever is actually next in line.
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](/inbox) for why that is the default rather than a feature.
## 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](/inbox/teams).
**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](/inbox/teams).
## The billing consequence
**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](/pricing/resolutions).
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](/pricing/resolutions).
## Next
The four signal tiers, and why a human message is always Tier 0.
What the agent can do before it ever reaches this point.
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