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.

Recommendation: Go with conditions; otherwise no-go for Monday.

The pilot met two launch criteria: 64% of drafts were accepted as-is or with minor edits, above the 60% target, and median time to first response fell 41%, exceeding the 30% target. Seven of eight agents also want to keep the feature.

But the launch does not currently meet the safety criteria. The eval found harmful drafts in 1.8% of cases, above the 1% ceiling. Six errors came from outdated billing prices—a significant exposure because billing handles 38% of tickets. And two drafts promised refunds, directly violating the “no draft may commit to a refund” criterion, even though agents caught them.

Before enabling drafts broadly, require: - Updated billing reference data and a rerun of the 500-ticket eval with no more than five wrong or harmful drafts. - A reliable safeguard against refund commitments, verified to produce zero such drafts. - Welsh-language tickets routed away from AI drafting until that issue is fixed.

If those gates pass before Monday, proceed with the launch and monitor closely. If they do not, delay the launch rather than rely on agents to catch known failure modes. The formatting issue should also be addressed or clearly covered in agent training, but it is not the main launch blocker.