Real-time escalation
Real-time escalation is handing a live call from an AI receptionist to a person (the business owner, a colleague, or a human answering desk) the moment a defined condition is met.
Also called: live escalation, escalate to a human
An AI receptionist should not handle every call. Escalation is the designed exit: a trigger (the caller asks for a person, an emergency keyword, a sentiment threshold, an out-of-scope request) and an ordered list of destinations to try.
Destinations can be the business’s own phones, a team member on rota, or a partner desk staffed by people. A good escalation path has timers and fallbacks so that a call never dies because the first destination did not answer.
Escalation is the mechanism that turns "the AI knows its limits" from a claim into something checkable.