Failure Pattern
The No-Fallback Design
An AI system ships with no path to a human when it's wrong, and the error reaches the customer directly.
What it looks like
- —There's no confidence threshold — the system always gives an answer, even a bad one
- —There's no visible way for a user to flag a wrong answer or reach a person
- —The first anyone hears about a bad response is a complaint, not a caught error
Why it happens
Building the escalation path is less visually impressive than the AI feature itself, so it's the part that gets cut or delayed under a deadline — exactly the part that determines whether failures are contained or public.
How to avoid it
Every AI-facing feature should get an explicit low-confidence escalation path before launch, not after the first bad response goes out. It's a design requirement, not a patch.
Have a project in mind?
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