Handover
Clarifying interview
A clarifying interview is a short set of targeted questions an agent asks before starting, used in place of guessing at an underspecified request.
Control sits with the person
When to use it
When the request contains an ambiguous reference, an unstated scope, or a quality bar the agent would otherwise pick for the person.
What it prevents
A confident wrong result delivered twenty minutes later, which costs more to diagnose than the questions cost to answer.
Research agentbefore starting
Two questions before this run starts.
- ?Which market do you mean by the Nordics?
Sweden only, or all five - ?How current does the evidence need to be?
This year, or the last three
Answering now costs a minute. Guessing costs the twenty minutes of the run.
Who ships it
- Deep research features across the major assistants
- Microsoft Magentic-UI: the orchestrator reasons about whether a task needs clarification before it plans
Sources
Related patterns: Intent preview · Escalation triad