Why AI support fails in production: The infrastructure problem behind every incident

AI support systems in customer service face significant challenges due to the limitations of HTTP streaming, which is not designed for sessions that persist through changes in participants or devices. Two main failures, session continuity and efficient human escalation, often occur because the existing infrastructure ties session state to a single connection, which doesn't accommodate the multi-device, multi-participant nature of customer support. These failures are frequently misdiagnosed as issues of state persistence or workflow but are rooted in an architectural constraint where each participant requires a separate connection with no shared session. The solution lies in decoupling session state from individual connections and creating durable sessions that any authenticated participant can access, thereby allowing seamless transitions across devices and participants. This concept of durable sessions is gaining traction as a necessary architectural evolution in customer experience engineering, enabling more reliable and efficient support interactions without necessitating extensive custom infrastructure.