AI Agent
The Abstain Gate
Cove AI escalates to your team instead of guessing when it is not confident - the confidence threshold controls how strict that bar is.
Cove AI is built around one hard rule: do not make things up. When the bot cannot ground an answer in your knowledge sources with enough confidence, it escalates the conversation to your team instead of fabricating a reply.
This is the abstain gate.
How it works
When a customer sends a message, the bot:
- Retrieves the most relevant chunks from your knowledge sources.
- Asks the AI model to generate an answer grounded strictly in those chunks.
- The model returns an answer along with a confidence score (0.0 to 1.0) and a decision.
If the confidence score is below the threshold, or if the model decides the question genuinely needs a human (account-specific issues, billing disputes, requests to “talk to someone”), the bot escalates instead of answering.
In those cases the conversation is marked for your team and the customer is handed off with a brief message explaining why.
The confidence threshold
You can tune how strict the bar is in Cove AI - Guardrails - Confidence threshold:
| Setting | Threshold | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 0.5 | You want the bot to try to answer as much as possible, even on thin coverage |
| Medium (recommended) | 0.6 | Balanced - good for most setups |
| High | 0.75 | You only want the bot to answer when it is very sure |
The right threshold depends on your knowledge coverage. A well-trained bot with comprehensive help articles can comfortably run at High. A bot with sparse coverage is better at Low or Medium while you fill the gaps.
If you are seeing too many escalations, check the Knowledge gaps report in AI agent analytics - it surfaces the recurring questions the bot is failing on so you know what to document.
The scope fence
The scope fence is a separate safety control. You can list topics that should always go to a human regardless of confidence - billing disputes, account cancellations, legal questions, and so on.
Any message that matches a fenced topic is escalated immediately without the bot attempting an answer. Configure it in Cove AI - Guardrails - Never answer these topics (one topic per line).
Max replies before handoff
You can also set a maximum number of bot replies per conversation. Once the bot has replied N times in a single thread, it hands off to a human automatically. Set it to 0 for no limit.
This is useful for preventing long bot-only threads where a customer might be looping without getting real help.
AI disclosure
Guardrails includes an AI disclosure toggle. When it is on, the bot’s replies are labeled so customers know they are talking to an AI assistant rather than a human. Turn it on to be transparent and to meet disclosure expectations in some regions; turn it off if you prefer the bot to blend in with the rest of your team. Configure it in Cove AI - Guardrails.
What the customer sees
When the bot escalates, it sends a short, warm handoff line to the customer (generated in context, not a generic template) before routing the conversation to your inbox. Customers are not left in the dark.
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