Guide
How to hand off an AI agent session to a teammate
AI agent handoff is passing ownership of a running agent session to a teammate or to another agent without losing the work already done. A good handoff moves the session itself rather than a copied transcript, and comes with a brief of where the work stands, what is waiting on a person, what the team asked for, and what happens next.
Why a copied transcript is not a handoff
Most teams hand AI work over by pasting a chat into a message or sending a link to a read-only conversation. The person receiving it has to read the whole thing to find out where it got to, cannot continue the same session, and has no way to tell which of the instructions in it still apply.
The longer an agent runs, the worse that gets. A task that has been going for three days has a plan, finished steps, a few directions from different people and probably a question nobody has answered. None of that is visible in a transcript without reading all of it.
What a good AI agent handoff includes
Whether the work is going to a person or to another agent, the receiver needs the same few things a good colleague would say in the corridor:
- Where the work stands: status, how many planned steps are done, and the latest result with its version.
- What is waiting on a person: an unanswered question from the agent, a result waiting for review, or two directions that disagree.
- What the team has asked for, in their own words, so the new owner does not reverse a decision by accident.
- What happens next, and any deadline the work is up against.
- What to be careful about, such as failed steps or a note from the person handing it off.
Handing off to a person and handing off to an agent
A handoff to a person changes who is accountable. The new owner is the one the agent's questions go to and the one who decides when the work is done.
A handoff to another agent changes who does the next part of the work, for example a research agent finishing and a writing agent picking up its result. Because that moves work without a person in between, it is worth requiring a person to approve it rather than letting agents pass work to each other unseen.
Common handoff mistakes
- Handing off while a step is still running, so two owners are both acting on work that is changing under them.
- A brief written from memory, which leaves out whatever the person handing off forgot. A brief built from the session's own record cannot.
- Losing the directions people gave, so the new owner steers the agent straight back into a mistake somebody already corrected.
How Vrittara does it
In Vrittara a person hands a live session to a teammate from inside the session. The handoff posts a brief assembled from the session's own record: where it stands, what is waiting on a person, what the team has asked for, what comes next and what to watch. It is built from the rows rather than written by a model, so it cannot invent a figure, and the person handing off sees the same brief as a preview before they press Hand off.
A task can also be handed to a different agent or to a person once its current step finishes, and agent-to-agent handoffs can wait for a person's approval before they happen.
Related guides
Common questions
- Can you hand off a ChatGPT or Claude conversation to a coworker?
- You can share a link to it, but the coworker gets a read-only copy they cannot continue as the same conversation. A handoff in a shared agent workspace moves the live session itself, so the new owner carries on from where it stopped.
- What should an AI agent handoff brief contain?
- Where the work stands, what is waiting on a person, what the team has asked for, what happens next and anything to be careful about. The most reliable briefs are assembled from the session's record rather than written from memory.
- Should AI agents be able to hand work to other agents on their own?
- Handing work between agents is useful, but a person should be able to see and approve it. Otherwise work moves between agents without anyone accountable for the change.