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FEATURE SPEC

Human Escalation & Context Handoff

Novaworks AI | x_novaw_guardrails | Stage: Refine | DRAFT

Parent Feature Set: ../concept.md.

History

Version Date Author / Notes
1 July 29, 2026 Eswar Vandanapu — Initial draft, derived from PRD Feature 6.
2 2026-08-11 Eswar Vandanapu — Noted a new dependency: coalition-of-the-willing/transfer-agents now provides generic hand-off infrastructure (reason code, optional summary, receiving-agent resolution) that any employee-choice escalation UI this Feature builds should call, rather than reinventing. See Dependencies and Open Questions.

Problem Statement

HR Operations / Case Management has no real-time visibility into which conversations are high-risk; escalations today depend on the employee re-reporting elsewhere. When Feature 5 or either guardrail engine triggers an escalation, there is no defined queue or case-record shape to hand the conversation off to.

Scope

When Feature 5 (Sensitive Conversation Detection & Routing) or either guardrail engine (Features 1–2) triggers an escalation, hand the conversation to a queue an HR Operations agent or case worker actually watches, carrying: - The full conversation context - The triggering reason - The request's correlation id, so the handoff can be traced end to end alongside the platform tracing work already underway

Out of Scope

Value

Gives HR Operations a live queue of flagged conversations with full context handed off automatically, so nothing sensitive is missed — closing the loop the PRD identifies as core to the framework, alongside Feature 5.

Delivery

Define the queue and case-record shape, route escalations from Features 1, 2, and 5 into it, and confirm the correlation id and conversation transaction count travel with the handoff.

Acceptance Criteria

  • [ ] Escalation queue is defined and reachable by an HR Operations agent / case worker
  • [ ] Case-record shape is defined, including: full conversation context, triggering reason, correlation id
  • [ ] Escalations from Feature 1 (Input Guardrail Engine) route into the queue
  • [ ] Escalations from Feature 2 (Output Guardrail Engine) route into the queue
  • [ ] Escalations from Feature 5 (Sensitive Conversation Detection & Routing) route into the queue
  • [ ] Correlation id travels with the handoff and can be traced end to end alongside the platform tracing work (Nova Platform Enhancements PRD v0.4)
  • [ ] Conversation transaction count travels with the handoff
  • [ ] Every escalation is reason-coded and available to Feature 4 (Observability, Audit & Feedback Loop)
  • Feature 1 — Input Guardrail Engine, Feature 2 — Output Guardrail Engine, Feature 5 — Sensitive Conversation Detection & Routing: each is a trigger source for this feature's queue.
  • Feature 4 — Guardrail Observability, Audit & Feedback Loop: case-record shape and audit fields should align with that feature's logging inventory once defined.
  • Nova Platform Enhancements PRD v0.4: correlation-id tracing and per-conversation transaction visibility are prerequisites this feature depends on.
  • Phase 1 Audit: which queues and case systems can receive an escalation must be confirmed by the audit before this feature's delivery plan is finalized.
  • coalition-of-the-willing/transfer-agents: new hand-off infrastructure — given a Transfer Reason, a Receiving Agent, and an optional summary, it records the transfer and resolves the Receiving Agent's contact details (currently a placeholder, not a live session). If this Feature grows an employee-choice escalation path (nudge/channel-picker, as shown in that Feature's reference design) alongside its current mandatory HR Ops queue path, that path should call this infrastructure rather than build its own.

Risks

Risk Severity Mitigation
No confirmed destination queue/case system for escalations yet High Phase 1 audit is a gate for this feature; do not finalize case-record shape until audit confirms available queues/case systems.
Correlation id or transaction count dropped somewhere in the handoff path Medium Explicit acceptance criterion to confirm both travel with the handoff; validate end-to-end trace as part of testing.
Feature 6 becomes a bottleneck for Feature 5's Experiment-stage timeline Medium Feature 5's spike outcome may change delivery scope/timing here — track as a joint dependency.

Open Questions

  • Which queue/case-management system(s) can receive an escalation — is there one shared destination across HR Ops today, or does the Phase 1 audit reveal multiple?
  • Is there a case-management UI in scope for HR Operations, or is "the queue" the entire deliverable for this stage?
  • What conversation context is "full" — entire transcript, or a bounded window plus summary?
  • This Feature's current scope is the mandatory HR Ops queue/case-record path only. A declinable, employee-choice private-transfer path (nudge, channel picker among human/AI destinations, summary review) is a candidate to add here, or under sensitive-conversation-detection-routing (Feature 5) instead, since that Feature already makes the per-turn routing call. Not decided — see the matching note on that Feature's own spec. Either way, that path should call coalition-of-the-willing/transfer-agents as its hand-off mechanism rather than build its own.

Status: DRAFT — derived from PRD Feature 6. For internal engineering review only.

Novaworks AI | Confidential