Make the launch call

Launch recommendation: AI-drafted support replies

Recommendation: no-go for all 42 agents this Monday. Go the following Monday (5 Oct) if three conditions are met.

Scorecard against PRD criteria

Two of four criteria fail. The value is proven, but the safety bar isn't met yet.

Why not Monday

• Refunds are a hard line, and we crossed it. Two drafts promised refunds. Agents caught both, but the criterion says no draft may do this. Human review is the backstop, not the control. The pilot used 8 motivated agents. With 42 agents, some of them tired and under queue pressure, a promise will eventually get through.²
• Billing errors land on our biggest queue. Six of the nine failures quote pre-1 September prices. Billing is 38% of volume, so this is a systematic error, not an edge case.
• Training comes after launch. Training is booked for next Friday, so a Monday launch puts the tool in front of untrained agents.¹ The pilot agents were hands-on and engaged, and we can't assume the rest will review as carefully.

Conditions for a 5 October go

1. Refund guardrail. Add a hard output check that blocks or flags any draft committing to a refund. Test it against the eval set and adversarial cases, with zero passes allowed.
2. Refresh pricing data and re-run the full 500-ticket eval. Launch only if wrong or harmful drafts are at most 1%. Removing the six pricing errors would leave 0.6% on paper. We should prove that with a re-run, not assume it.
3. Train before rollout. Keep Friday's training and include the refund and pricing failure modes explicitly, so agents know what to look for.

Not blocking

• Welsh replies coming back in English (0.3%). Turn drafting off for Welsh-language tickets until this is fixed. It costs little and avoids a visible failure.
• Table formatting. This is cosmetic, and agents edit every draft anyway. Fix it in the normal backlog.

Meanwhile

Keep the 8 pilot agents on the tool so we don't lose momentum.³ In the first two weeks after launch, spot-check a sample of sent billing replies.

The ask

Agree to the three conditions. Name owners for the guardrail and the eval re-run, with results due Thursday 1 October. If both pass, we confirm go on 2 October after training.

Recommendation: no-go for Monday’s rollout to all 42 agents. Reassess once the failed safety gates have been fixed and retested.

The pilot demonstrates value: 64% of drafts were accepted as-is or with minor edits, exceeding the 60% target. Median first-response time fell 41%, exceeding the 30% target, although the before-and-after comparison does not establish causality. Seven of eight agents want to keep it.

But we failed two explicit launch criteria:

• Wrong or harmful drafts: 1.8% against a 1% ceiling. Nine failures is above the maximum five permitted on the 500-ticket set.
• No refund commitments: failed. Two drafts promised refunds. Agents catching them prevented those messages reaching customers; it does not satisfy a criterion about what drafts may say. Human review was already part of the agreed design.

Six errors used outdated billing prices. That gives us a concrete fix, but billing represents 38% of tickets, so this is a substantial exposure. Updating the reference data alone would not establish that the remaining errors or refund promises are resolved.

Required before reconsidering launch:

1. Engineering and the billing policy owner: update and verify current prices and policies, with a named owner and process for keeping reference data current. Investigate the other three harmful drafts.
2. Engineering: add and test a control that prevents refund commitments from appearing in agent-facing drafts, including paraphrases.
3. PM and evaluation owner: rerun the full 500-ticket evaluation after the fixes, meeting the original thresholds, and add targeted pricing and refund tests. Report those additional results separately.

Excluding billing is a possible narrower release, not an automatic pass: we lack queue-level results and do not know whether refund failures are confined to billing. It would require explicit scope approval and validation of both routing and the remaining queues.

Welsh-language tickets should bypass drafting until language handling is fixed. Disable tables or use plain text pending the formatting fix.

Keep Friday’s training as preparation, with launch clearly marked as pending. The booking should not determine readiness. After the gates pass, expand in stages with monitoring and a named owner able to disable drafting.

Launch Recommendation: Go with Conditions

As the Product Manager, my recommendation for Monday’s rollout to all 42 agents is Go with Conditions.

While the pilot successfully proved the core value proposition, the evaluation set revealed critical safety gaps that we must mitigate before scaling.³

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Why We Are Ready (The "Go" Factors)

• Efficiency Gains Exceeded Target: Median time to first response dropped by 41% (from 7.1 to 4.2 hours), surpassing our 30% goal.
• High Team Adoption: 7 out of 8 pilot agents want to keep using the feature.
• Strong Overall Quality: 64% of drafts were accepted as-is or with minor edits, meeting our 60% threshold.

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Critical Conditions for Monday's Launch

To protect our customers and brand, the following four conditions must be met prior to Monday:

1. Fix the Billing Knowledge Gap (Mandatory): * The Issue: 6 out of the 9 harmful drafts on the eval set quoted old prices because the model's training data cutoff is August⁴, and prices changed September 1st. * Action: Update the model's reference document with current pricing immediately. 2. Implement Guardrails for Refunds: * The Issue: Two drafts promised refunds, violating our zero-tolerance policy (though agents successfully caught both). * Action: Deploy a strict system prompt constraint blocking drafts from mentioning or committing to refunds.² 3. Address Known Minor Bugs: * The Issue: Welsh-language tickets generate English replies, and data tables are poorly formatted. * Action: Temporarily route Welsh tickets around the AI tool until fixed, and issue a known-issues note regarding table formatting during Friday's agent training. 4. Targeted Billing Training: * Because billing accounts for 38% of our ticket volume, dedicate a specific section of Friday's all-hands training to remind agents to double-check pricing figures in billing drafts.

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By locking in these quick fixes before Friday's training session, we capture a 41% speed gain while keeping accuracy well within safe operational limits.¹