Support Triage Agents: The Highest-Leverage Starting Point for Agentic AI
Support teams are overloaded because every request arrives as unstructured text.
A triage agent helps by turning text into structured work.
What a triage agent should do
- Summarize the issue
- Classify intent
- Estimate urgency
- Pull relevant account context
- Route to the right team
- Draft a first response
That is a lot, but each step can be validated.
What it should not do (at first)
- Close tickets automatically
- Issue refunds
- Change production configurations
Start with low-risk tasks and expand.
A simple routing design
Create categories that match your org:
- Billing
- Integrations
- Bugs
- Feature requests
- Security
Then define routing rules. The agent proposes a category, your system enforces allowed assignments.
Evaluation
Measure:
- Correct routing rate
- Time to first response
- Human edit rate
If edit rate is high, improve prompts and retrieval.
Closing thought
Support triage is a great first agent because success is visible and measurable.
You will know quickly whether it helps.