Agent Handoff

The transfer of an in-progress task from one agent (or human) to another, with enough context to continue without restart.

Handoff is the multi-agent equivalent of “I’ll transfer you to my colleague” — and inherits the same risk of losing context in the transition. A good handoff includes: the original goal, what’s been tried, current state, why this agent is the right next handler, and any open questions.

In customer support contexts, agent-to-human handoffs are the highest-stakes moment of an interaction. Surveys consistently find that users tolerate AI agents fine until a botched handoff repeats their entire issue from scratch. The technical fix is structured handoff payloads; the operational fix is testing handoffs as first-class user flows, not edge cases.