A human reply always outranks the AI. If you or a teammate reply to a conversation, or pause it, the AI stops replying to that thread. The AI also hands off on its own when a customer asks something outside its playbook, like negotiating price or terms, sending a handoff message instead of guessing an answer.
The AI waits a short moment after each customer message before answering. If an agent sends a reply in that window, before the AI's reply goes out, the AI stands down for that turn instead of sending its own reply on top of yours. There's no race to beat: replying is enough, you don't need to pause anything first for a one-off reply.
Every playbook has a scope: the persona, criteria, and questions you wrote. If a customer asks something outside that scope, most commonly negotiating price, terms, or a refund, the AI does not try to answer from outside its brief. Instead it hands the conversation to a human: it sends a handoff message (a default one, or the custom text you set in the playbook) and stops replying. The lead's stage is left exactly as it was, so nothing about the pipeline changes until a person makes that call.
Open the conversation in the inbox. Its header shows a Pause AI control while the AI is active on that thread. Pausing stops the AI from replying to that conversation; you can optionally send a custom handoff message at the same time, or pause silently. Once paused, the control switches to Resume AI, which hands the conversation back to the AI, as long as your organization still has a live playbook and the lead is still eligible for qualification.
Only one thing replies to a given customer message. Stravax Engage checks in a fixed order: a human already on the conversation always wins first, an automated flow or reply that's already covering that message (such as a chatbot flow in progress, or a business-hours away or welcome message) wins next, and the AI qualifier only gets a turn if none of those apply. In practice this means the AI never talks over a human, and never double-replies alongside your other automation.
For what the AI does when it does get a turn, see What the AI qualifier does. For setting the handoff message and the questions it asks before handing off, see Writing your qualification playbook.