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Agentic AI
Planning & Control Flow
Disambiguation
Have the agent ask a clarifying question before acting on an ambiguous request.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Have the agent ask a clarifying question before acting on an ambiguous request.
📋 Context
A team is building an agent that takes free-form user requests and acts on them — moving a calendar event, editing a file, sending a message. Real user requests are often underspecified or refer to entities the agent cannot uniquely resolve from context. The deployment is interactive enough that the agent can ask a follow-up question before doing anything irreversible.
💡 Solution
- Detect ambiguity via low-confidence intent classification or an explicit ambiguity rubric. - When ambiguity is detected, ask one focused clarifying question and wait for the user’s answer before acting. - Phrase the question with the most-likely interpretation stated as the default, so the user can confirm quickly if the default is correct.
Real-world Use Case
- Ambiguous user requests would otherwise produce confidently wrong agent actions.
- Ambiguity can be detected (low-confidence intent, explicit rubric, multiple plausible parses).
- A focused clarifying question with a default interpretation is acceptable UX.
Source
Advantages
- Quality improvement on ambiguous inputs; reduces costly wrong actions.
- User feels in control and informed.
Disadvantages
- Latency penalty before action.
- Conversational drag if disambiguation is triggered too aggressively.