Handoff
Qué es Handoff?
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A handoff is the point where a live interaction passes from an agent's bot to a human — or, in a multi-agent setup, to an allowlisted downstream agent — carrying the full conversation context, not a summary. A bot-to-human handoff pauses the conversation until a human releases it back; a bot-to-bot handoff starts a fresh run on the receiving agent. The destination must be explicitly allowlisted, never open-ended.
More detail
A handoff is a same-organization event: the bot routes the conversation either to a human queue (the shared inbox) or to one of the agents on its handoff-targets allowlist. Every bot-to-agent destination runs through that allowlist — an agent can name only the peers it was explicitly granted, and anything the model guesses outside the allowlist is rejected at the runtime tool call and again at the internal handoff API.
Handoff is distinct from A2A (Agent-to-Agent) federation. A2A is cross-organization task routing over the A2A protocol's signed agent cards — an agent tasks a remote peer or accepts inbound tasks from one. A handoff moves an already-running conversation inside one organization. The two composable primitives solve different problems, and an agent may use both.
A handoff also differs from human-in-the-loop approval. The human-in-the-loop guardrails step gates specific agent actions with an approve/deny gate; a handoff transfers the whole conversation. Triggering a handoff does not require the guardrails step, though either or both can live on one agent.
Preguntas frecuentes
- Is a handoff the same as A2A federation?
- No. A handoff moves a live conversation inside one organization — bot to human, or bot to an allowlisted downstream agent. A2A federation is cross-organization: an agent tasks a remote peer (or accepts an inbound task) over the A2A protocol's signed agent cards. An agent can use handoffs for internal routing and A2A for external peers at the same time.
- What carries over in a handoff — the full conversation or a summary?
- The full conversation context. The receiving human or downstream agent inherits the entire transcript and history, not an agent-written summary, so the customer never has to repeat themselves and the receiving side reads exactly what happened.
- Can an agent hand off to any other agent?
- No. Every bot-to-agent destination must sit on the source agent's handoff-targets allowlist. A transfer attempt naming an agent outside the allowlist is rejected inside the runtime tool handler, and the internal handoff API rejects it again with 403 FORBIDDEN even with a valid token.
See also
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