Handoff
Transfer the active conversation from one agent to a more appropriate specialist mid-flight — passing a context summary so the user never has to repeat themselves.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Transfer the active conversation from one agent to another, carrying context across the switch.
📋 Context
An agent system has several specialists — tier-1 support, billing, technical, sales — and one is mid-conversation when it realises the request actually belongs to a different specialist. The user has already explained their situation; forcing them to start over would be a poor experience.
💡 Solution
Define a handoff tool. The current agent invokes it with target agent and a context summary. The target receives the summary plus the original conversation and continues from there. Loop detection prevents thrash.
Real-world Use Case
- Mid-conversation routing must transfer context to a more appropriate specialist.
- Multiple specialised agents exist and not every conversation belongs to just one.
- A context summary plus the original conversation is enough for the target to continue without re-asking.
Source
📌 TL;DR
When the wrong specialist is talking to the user, pass a context summary to the right one — the conversation continues without the user ever noticing the switch.
Advantages
- Specialisation without supervisor overhead on every single turn.
- User-visible continuity — the conversation doesn’t restart from scratch.
Disadvantages
- Context summary fidelity bounds the quality of everything the target agent does.
- Loop detection is its own code path that must be built and tested explicitly.