Your AI agent shouldn’t know everything – it should know who to ask

Intro

Consumers across APJ are getting more impatient. They expect brands to resolve their issues in just 24 minutes on average.
If the brand is unsuccessful, 34% say they’ll switch channels to find a faster path to resolution, and 30% say they’ll abandon the effort altogether.
Most leaders reading this insight would respond by improving agent response times, but speed isn’t the problem. The crux is that consumers want a solution, not to wait less.
Unfortunately, the AI that most brands have deployed are chatbots who try to handle everything (and then fail).
What we’re seeing is the opposite. The most productive agents aren’t generalists, but specialists who excel at one thing and know when to hand off when they can’t handle something.
This intelligent orchestration is a superpower.

90% of business leaders believe their customers are satisfied with conversational AI, but only 59% of consumers agree.
54% of consumers say AI agents rarely or never have context about them as a customer.
78% say it’s important to be able to switch from an AI agent to a human, yet only 15% report experiencing seamless handoffs.
Most escalations involve lost context, repeated explanations, and restarted conversations. Every misroute doesn’t just waste one interaction—it triggers a cascade. The customer calls back, a second agent asks the same questions, trust erodes, and the next interaction starts from a deficit.
It’s no wonder that 42% of consumers say AI makes them less patient, not more. 41% are satisfied with how brands currently use AI.
For customer service teams, the real challenge is routing, not tech.

Brands need four capabilities for self-service AI agents to work.
- 1. Agency: Specialised agents that can handle defined tasks with precision and don’t attempt everything and resolve nothing.
- 2. Always-on monitoring: The system must monitor interaction quality in real time and catch failures before they compound into callbacks.
- 3. Real-time contextual data: Agents must have a unified view of the customer, including history, intent, and recent interactions.
- 4. Intelligent routing: The system must accurately decide in the moment whether a task stays with AI, moves to a specialist, or escalates to a human with full context.
Of these four, routing is the most underinvested and the one that determines whether the other three deliver value.

Think of routing not as plumbing but as decision-making.
A well-designed system evaluates task complexity, required skills, customer history, sentiment, and more before matching it to the right resource.
For example, a complex billing dispute will be routed to a senior billing specialist, not the next available generalist. A routing appointment request stays with the AI agent that can solve it in seconds.
When the AI encounters an edge case it can’t handle, the routing layer transfers the task, along with full context, so the next agent can pick up where the AI left off.
Twilio’s own research confirms this. 42% of consumers prefer starting with a human agent, even if it takes longer, while 23% are comfortable starting with AI and escalating when needed.
Both paths demand routing intelligence. The AI-first customer needs seamless escalation, and the human-first customer needs to reach the right human immediately. Neither can afford a misroute.

Every issue resolved on first contact is one fewer repeat call in the queue.
Fewer repeat calls mean shorter wait times for everyone.
This compounding effect extends to agent capacity. When routing works, human agents are freed from solving issues that should have been addressed the first time. They spend their time on complex, high-value interactions instead.
This is what 72% of consumers are signaling when they say they’d choose AI over a human if the issue was guaranteed to be solved faster.
46% of consumers say quick service and resolution are their top priorities, and 51% say delays are acceptable if they lead to better customer support.
Patience is available but only when the brands earn it by sending customers to the right place the first time.
The brands that treat routing as an afterthought will keep optimising for speed and see their customers quietly leave. Those who optimise for resolution will build trust that compounds with every interaction.