Every contact center has an escalation policy. Almost none of them can prove the AI followed it.
AI now fronts a large share of customer conversations, and the industry measures it by deflection — how many contacts were resolved without a human. That number rewards the AI for keeping the conversation, which is exactly the wrong incentive at the moment a customer needs a person.
So the failure is quiet. A frustrated, confused, or vulnerable customer stays in an automated loop that is scored as a success, because the one thing the system optimizes for is not handing them off. Nothing in the stack is accountable for the opposite obligation: recognizing when the AI must stop and yield to a human, and being able to show afterward that it did.
Project Threshold applies Corvion’s emotional-governance research to the escalation decision. It governs the AI’s obligation to yield — treating the handoff to a human as a governed, recorded event rather than a failure of containment.
Asks whether a customer was actually served, rather than whether the contact was contained.
Limits that stop the system from optimizing containment past the point of a customer’s benefit.
Defined conditions under which the AI must yield the conversation to a person.
Studying whether the yield behaves the same for customers who express the same need in different ways.
Project Threshold governs when an AI system must hand a conversation to a human. It does not score, profile, or assess customers; it does not evaluate agent performance; and it does not make eligibility, credit, or entitlement decisions of any kind.
This is a live research direction at Corvion, run in the open by design. The work centers on a single question: when an AI must yield a conversation to a human, against every metric that rewards it for holding on.
Our approach is to define that question rigorously — the criteria, the failure modes, and what would count as an answer — before building anything to serve it. We publish findings here as the work develops, including the results that don’t hold up.
We’re looking for contact-center operators, CX platform teams, financial-services conduct and complaints functions, and accessibility researchers willing to test where the yield line belongs.