Quick answerAn AI agent acting as a live, active mediator between two parties in a shared marketplace, such as a buyer and seller disputing a transaction in real time, needs an explicit neutrality design that both sides can trust, a clearly bounded authority over what it can actually decide versus merely suggest, and a mandatory handoff point where a human takes over if either party contests the agent's role. This is meaningfully different from using an agent's transcripts and records to help a human adjudicate a dispute between two customers after the fact, where the agent is a passive evidence source and a human forms the actual conclusion. Here the agent is an active participant in the live conversation, potentially proposing resolutions to both sides in real time, which raises a distinct set of trust and authority questions.
Real-time mediation is a different role than fact-finding
The internal fact-finding scenario assumes the dispute is already over, or at least paused, and a human is now piecing together what happened using records the agent helped generate. A live mediation scenario is happening while both parties are still actively engaged, often simultaneously, and the agent's words and proposed resolutions directly shape how the dispute unfolds in the moment. That live, active role is why this needs its own governance framework rather than inheriting the fact-finding post's guidance, since the risks of getting it wrong show up immediately in the conversation rather than surfacing later in a review.
Structural neutrality has to be visible, not just claimed
Both parties in a marketplace dispute need a real reason to trust that the agent isn't quietly favoring the platform's own commercial interest, or favoring whichever party generates more revenue for the platform. Build this trust structurally rather than through a stated policy alone: the agent should follow a documented, publicly available dispute-resolution framework that applies identically regardless of either party's account value or tenure, and it should be able to explain, if asked by either party, exactly what standard it's applying and why, in the same conversation, not through a separate opaque process.
Bound its authority explicitly before it ever sits in a live dispute
Decide in advance exactly what the agent can do unilaterally, such as proposing a specific resolution within a pre-approved range, versus what always requires human sign-off, such as any resolution involving an amount above a set threshold, a repeat dispute between the same two parties, or any resolution either party explicitly rejects. Publish this boundary internally as a hard rule, not a guideline the agent applies with judgment, since a live mediation is exactly the wrong moment to discover the authority boundary was ambiguous.
Either party contesting the agent's role should trigger an automatic human handoff
If either party in the dispute states that they don't want an AI mediating, or directly challenges the agent's proposed resolution as unfair, that should be a hard trigger for human takeover, not a cue for the agent to argue its own neutrality or double down on its proposal. An agent that continues trying to convince a skeptical party of its own fairness is actively making the trust problem worse; the correct response to being challenged on neutrality is to hand off, not to persuade.
Keep a full, shareable record of what the agent said to each side
Because the agent is actively shaping the conversation with both parties, maintain a complete record of what it communicated to each side, available to both parties on request, not just to internal reviewers. This is a stronger transparency bar than most internal-facing agent logging, but it's necessary here specifically because both parties in a live mediation have a legitimate stake in verifying the agent treated them consistently with what it told the other side, building on the same discipline behind documenting AI agent reasonableness over time for disputes generally, just held to a higher bar of mutual visibility given the live, two-sided nature of a mediation.
Escalation-worthy disputes need pre-identified categories, not case-by-case judgment
Certain dispute categories should route straight to human mediation without the agent attempting live mediation at all: anything involving an allegation of fraud, harassment, or a safety concern between the two parties, anything where the disputed value exceeds a set threshold, and any dispute where one party has a documented history of repeat disputes. Identify these categories in advance rather than trusting the agent to recognize in the moment that a particular live dispute has crossed into territory it shouldn't be handling alone.
FAQ
Can the agent's proposed resolution ever be binding without human sign-off? Only within a narrow, pre-approved range for low-value, low-complexity disputes where both parties have agreed in advance, as part of the marketplace's terms, that automated resolution within that range is binding; anything outside that pre-approved scope should require human confirmation before it takes effect.
How is this different from the agent settling a contradiction between two of its own answers? Entirely different problem. Reconciling a live cross-party contradiction between conflicting factual claims is about determining what's true when two parties disagree on facts; mediating a marketplace dispute is about brokering an acceptable resolution both parties want, even when the facts themselves may not be in dispute at all.
Should the same agent that handles normal marketplace support also handle mediation? It can be the same underlying system, but the mediation role should run under a distinctly different, more constrained policy configuration than everyday support interactions, given the heightened neutrality and authority requirements described above, rather than treating mediation as just another topic the general support agent happens to handle.
What happens if both parties accept the agent's proposed resolution but one later claims they felt pressured? Treat this the same as any other contested resolution: have a human review the full record of what was communicated to that party, and if the record shows anything resembling pressure rather than a genuinely offered choice, unwind the resolution and route the dispute back to human mediation, regardless of whether the outcome itself seemed fair.