When do customers still need a human, and how do you design the AI-to-human handoff?

Klarna's reversal settled the debate: AI keeps the volume, but customers must always be able to reach a person, especially for emotional, high-stakes, or account-critical issues. Good escalation fires on explicit requests, detected frustration, and risky keywords like refund or legal, and it transfers the full conversation context so the customer never repeats themselves. The team changes too: instead of a ticket queue, small startups end up with humans running AI operations, knowledge, and the hard 30% of conversations.