87% want a human. Design voice agents with an exit
A new Gartner survey says customers accept AI service when a human is reachable. The same principle makes back-office voice agents safer, cheaper and easier to trust.
Gartner surveyed 3,566 customers earlier this year. 87% say a human option is essential when companies use generative AI for customer service. At the same time, 50% say interactions are easier with generative AI. Gartner's advice: do not make AI a mandatory first step, attempt resolution only when confidence is high, and always provide a clear path to a person.
That is consumer-facing service. But the same rule, always have an exit, is the most important design decision in back-office voice agents too.
Money follows the pattern
Healthcare voice AI keeps attracting capital. In June, Assort Health raised a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, reporting more than 190 million patient voice interactions on its platform. The category is real. The question for each deployment is where the agent should stop.
Exits we design into every voice agent
- Confidence exit. If the agent is not sure where it is in a phone menu, or what it heard, it stops and hands the case to a person with the recording and transcript, instead of guessing.
- Scope exit. If the person on the other end asks something outside the agent's script, it says so politely, ends the call cleanly, and routes the case.
- Policy exit. Some steps are never automated: anything that commits money, changes clinical information or needs judgment. The agent prepares; a person acts.
- Human request. If the other party asks for a person, the agent arranges a callback from staff. No loops.
- Budget exit. A call that runs too long or retries too often is stopped. Cost per case stays predictable.
Exits make automation cheaper
It sounds like exits reduce automation. In practice they increase it. An agent that knows when to stop can be trusted with more cases, because its failures are visible and cheap. An agent that never stops has to be watched all the time, which defeats the purpose.
We report the exit rate per reason every week. It is the best map we have of where to improve the agent next.
Sources
- Gartner Survey Finds 87% of Customers Say Companies Using GenAI for Customer Service Must Provide Access to a Human Agent, Gartner, August 4, 2026.
- Assort Health Raises $120 Million Series C To Scale AI Agents For Patient Journey, Pulse 2.0, June 24, 2026.