-
-
Escalation Room Live
-
Architecture
Inspiration
Sometimes the hardest part isn't finding a therapist. It's finding information you can trust.
Families often spend hours calling therapists, only to learn that the phone number has changed, the provider isn't accepting new patients, or they no longer take Medicaid.
Our companion project, Escalation Room Society, investigates those reports automatically. But some decisions are too important to leave entirely to AI. A wrong answer about Medicaid acceptance could cause a family to overlook a therapist who could actually help them.
That inspired Escalation Room Live: a simple place where AI gathers evidence, humans make the final decision, and everyone stays in the tools they already use.
What it does
Escalation Room Live brings high-impact verification tasks into Slack.
A reviewer receives a single decision card with the evidence collected so far. If more evidence is needed, they simply ask the AI agent to call the provider's office.
The agent places a real verification call, returns with what it learned, updates the investigation, and lets the reviewer make the final decision.
The experience is intentionally simple:
- one investigation
- one phone call
- one new piece of evidence
- one human decision
How we built it
We built Escalation Room Live as the human collaboration interface for Escalation Room.
Slack provides the workspace where reviewers interact with an AI agent. The investigation engine supplies evidence, answers questions, and performs verification tasks such as phone calls. Live focuses on helping reviewers understand the evidence and make decisions without leaving Slack.
One design goal guided every decision: make the human's job as effortless as possible.
Challenges
The biggest challenge wasn't building the phone call.
It was deciding what not to show.
Early versions looked like dashboards full of confidence scores, agent reasoning, and technical details. We kept removing information until every screen answered one question:
What does the reviewer need to decide right now?
That led us to a much simpler experience centered around one investigation and one decision.
What we're proud of
The phone call became the moment we were aiming for.
Watching an AI agent leave Slack, call a real phone, return with new evidence, and help a human make a better decision feels surprisingly natural.
We're also proud that the experience stays focused. Rather than overwhelming reviewers with AI internals, Escalation Room Live keeps attention on the evidence and the decision.
What we learned
Building trustworthy AI isn't only about better models.
It's about knowing when people should stay in control.
We also learned that the most memorable AI experiences aren't always the most complicated ones. Sometimes the simplest interaction, asking an agent to make a phone call, creates the strongest impression.
What's next
Today the demo focuses on therapist verification for Medicaid families.
The same workflow could support many other high-stakes reviews, from customer escalations to compliance investigations and public service directories.
Our goal is to make human review feel as seamless as asking a teammate for help.
For the full story behind both Escalation Room Society and Escalation Room Live, including the design journey, demo videos, and screenshots, check out our Medium post:
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.