Dispatch AI overview

What the assistant does, what it will not do, and how it fits the platform.

Dispatch AI overview

Dispatch AI is Acme Parcel's assistant for dispatchers and support agents. It does three things, and only three things:

  1. Answers parcel-status questions in a conversation, grounded in live tracking events from the platform API.
  2. Proposes reroutes for at-risk shipments — ranked options with confidence scores; a dispatcher applies one, the assistant never acts.
  3. Drafts customer replies for support tickets — always reviewed by a human agent before sending.

Boundaries

The assistant is deliberately read-only against the platform (ADR-001): it consumes the tracking API like any client and owns no parcel data. Its own state — conversations, the retrieval index, the prompt registry — lives in the dispatch_ai database (see the schema).

How an answer is produced

Every assistant turn follows the same path: retrieve top-k knowledge chunks and the shipment's tracking events, assemble the prompt from the registry, call the model, stream the reply. The request-flow diagram traces it end to end.

Where the knowledge comes from

Runbooks, carrier SLAs, and policy pages are ingested through the knowledge API, chunked, and embedded into Postgres — see ADR-003 for why retrieval beat fine-tuning, and ADR-004 for why the vectors live in Postgres.