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Design an AI-powered customer support chatbot.
The interviewer is not looking for a vendor shopping list. They want to see whether you understand that support bots sit on top of trust, policy, and customer operations. The strong answer separates informational help from account-changing actions and explains how the system knows when to stop pretending and escalate.
01Interview Context
The interviewer is not looking for a vendor shopping list. They want to see whether you understand that support bots sit on top of trust, policy, and customer operations. The strong answer separates informational help from account-changing actions and explains how the system knows when to stop pretending and escalate.
02The 90-second answer
I would design the system as layered paths: channel ingress, orchestration, retrieval for informational answers, action tools for authenticated account work, policy checks, and human escalation. The central design choice is that read-only help and write actions should not share the same safety posture. Informational answers can move quickly with confidence gates. Account-changing actions need identity, permissions, audit logs, and rollback-safe APIs.