Macha Concepts

Human Handoff

Definition

Human handoff is Macha's principle of keeping a person in the loop on anything customer-facing — most concretely through confirmation gates that pause an agent before any write action in interactive chat, and escalation patterns that route hard cases to your team.

Also known as: human-in-the-loopescalationconfirmation gate

How it works

In interactive chat, read-only actions (searching, looking things up) run automatically, but every write action — sending a public reply, updating a ticket, issuing a refund — pauses. The agent first announces what it's about to do in plain language, then shows a confirmation card with the exact parameters. You Confirm or Cancel; nothing customer-facing happens without your approval.

Handoff also happens at the workflow level: an escalation-handler agent identifies tickets that need a person, adds an internal note with context, and routes them to the right team or teammate using the helpdesk's native assignment.

Chat vs autonomous

The confirmation gate is a chat-mode affordance. Once an agent is promoted to autonomous mode with a trigger, there's no human present and write actions execute immediately — which is exactly why Macha recommends testing an agent in chat before automating it, and why sub-agents stay read-only when their parent runs interactively.

Frequently asked

Does the agent ever act on customers without approval?

In interactive chat, no — every write pauses for confirmation. In autonomous mode there's no gate, so writes execute immediately; that's why you test in chat first and scope autonomous agents' write tools deliberately.

How does an agent hand a ticket to a human?

Escalation-style agents flag the ticket, post an internal note with context, and route it to the appropriate team or teammate via the helpdesk's native assignment tools.

Chat & confirmations docs

Related terms

Confirmation Gates

A confirmation gate is the pause Macha puts in front of any write action in interactive chat: before the agent sends a reply, updates a ticket, or issues a refund, it shows you exactly what it wants to do and waits for you to Confirm or Cancel..

Escalation

Escalation is the process of moving a support ticket to a higher tier, a specialist, or a manager when the current agent can't resolve it or when it risks breaching an SLA..

Autonomous Agent

An autonomous agent is an AI system that pursues a goal on its own — deciding what steps to take, calling tools, and acting on the results — with little or no step-by-step human direction..

AI Guardrails

AI guardrails are the rules, checks, and constraints placed around an AI system to keep its behavior safe, on-topic, and within policy — controlling what it can say, do, and access..

Put these ideas to work

Macha is an AI agent layer that sits on top of the help desk you already run — Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Intercom, or Gorgias.

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