Lodgestory, the customer-messaging and calling platform for businesses like hotels, villas, clinics and other customer-facing businesses, has released a human-in-the-loop system for its AI agent, Kaylee. The agent can now ask a teammate a single question in the middle of a customer conversation, hold risky actions until a person approves them, and, when nobody is online, phone the business’s on-call roster on its own number and take a spoken answer.
The feature ships inside the AI Agent step of Lodgestory’s Bot Journeys and is included on every paid plan. It works across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email and the company’s web chat.
Currently, AI support agents tend to fail in one of two ways, the company says: they guess at an answer that is not in their knowledge, or they take an action nobody sanctioned, such as issuing a refund because a customer sounded upset. The common fix has been to hand the whole conversation to a human. That assumes someone is sitting at the inbox. For most of the businesses, the hardest hour is the one when nobody is available in the shift or when the cost is high to operate 24×7.
Kaylee’s approach is a ladder. When the AI agent hits a question only a real person can answer, it tells the customer it is checking and raises a request internally. The request appears as a card in the Kaylee console, inside the conversation and in the team’s chat, and whoever’s turn it is gets an in-app alert and a phone push. Turns last one to sixty minutes, with a five-minute default. If the first person does not answer, the turn passes to the next. If the turns run out, or nobody is online to begin with, the agent phones the on-call roster in order, on one of the business’s own Lodgestory Voice numbers. The question is read out in the agent’s voice in real time; the teammate can approve with a keypress, pick an option by number, or record an answer, hear it read back, and send it. Then the AI agent interprets the response smartly and then replies to the customer in its own words.
One of the smart options is that every answer is updated in the knowledge base so that there is no repetition of the queries and gradually builds up a perfect knowledge base to answer any type of query.
Approval mechanism also works the same way for actions. Hand-overs, resolving a conversation, moving a workflow stage, creating tickets, editing lead or contact details, and any API tool a business connects can each be set to off, automatic or needs approval. A reviewer can approve as proposed, approve with edited values, or reject. If nobody answers in time, a held change is rejected rather than quietly made, and the agent falls back to whatever the business chose: hand over with a ticket, tell the customer a teammate will follow up, or carry on.
As Gopal Khandelwal, Co-founder of Lodgestory, explained in a virtual release event on Monday:
“Every AI agent in support either guesses or overreaches”, “Handing the whole chat to a human assumes someone is at the inbox. At 1 am, nobody is. So, Kaylee does what a good night manager does: asks one person one question, and if that person doesn’t pick up, phones whoever is on call. Waking someone for a yes or no is fine. Waking them to take over a conversation isn’t.” This is first in India and second globally to empower AI with correct tools to take informative decisions and not a guess work.
The release lands five months after Intercom added an “ask a teammate” step to Fin, its support agent, with approvals handled in the inbox or Slack. Lodgestory’s pitch is what happens after that: per-team on-call hours, a turn-based roster, the phone step, and auto-rejection when nobody responds. This new feature in Lodgestory will definitely reduce the agent work load and will ensure perfect response every time with full control over AI.
Developers get two webhook events, a REST endpoint and five MCP tools, so a request can be answered from an internal system or another AI assistant. The company says the first answer wins, whichever surface it comes from.
Lodgestory says it has processed over 9.2 million messages and 571,000 calls for its customers to date.
The new capabilities are included in every paid plan.
Learn more about Lodgestory’s AI customer support and customer communication platform at Lodgestory.com
