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Building an Escalation Root-Cause Agent with Gemini and ADK

A customer service team lead at Amazon built an escalation root-cause analysis agent using Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Gemini, deployed on Cloud Run. The agent automatically classifies escalation summaries, flags repeat patterns, and drafts coaching notes, aiming to scale manual review processes. The developer also created a batch runner script for processing CSV files of cases and plans to integrate with ticketing systems via MCP in the future.

read2 min views1 publishedAug 21, 2026

Gen AI Academy APAC — Track 1 (AI Agents with Gemini, ADK, and Cloud Run)

I lead a customer service team of 25 agents at Amazon, handling both

buyer-side and marketplace seller support. A big part of my job is

reviewing escalated cases — calls or chats where a customer asked for

a supervisor — and figuring out why they escalated in the first

place. Was it a policy gap? A training issue? A system limitation

nobody flagged?

Right now, that review is manual. Every escalation gets read, tagged,

and turned into a coaching note by a human — usually me, or one of my

leads. It works, but it doesn't scale well, and patterns across dozens

of cases are easy to miss when you're reviewing them one at a time

between everything else on your plate.

So for Track 1 of the Gen AI Academy APAC program, I built an agent

that does the first pass of this analysis automatically: read an

escalation summary, classify the root cause against a standard

taxonomy, flag whether it looks like a repeat pattern, and draft a

coaching note — the same way I would, just faster and more

consistently.

The agent takes a case summary like this:

Customer requested a refund for a damaged item outside the standard

return window. Agent denied it citing policy; customer says a rep

last month approved a similar exception for someone else.

And returns a structured analysis:

{
  "root_cause_category": "policy_misapplication",
  "severity": "medium",
  "is_likely_repeat_pattern": true,
  "pattern_reasoning": "Inconsistent policy application across agents
  suggests a training or documentation gap rather than an isolated
  error.",
  "coaching_note": "..."
}

It's built on Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) with Gemini

as the underlying model, and deployed as a live service on Cloud Run. The agent has one tool — a lookup function for the standard

For batch review, I also built a runner script that processes a whole

CSV of cases at once and outputs a summary report — closer to how I'd

actually use this day to day, reviewing a batch of the week's

escalations rather than one at a time.

A few things stood out going through this:

The repo includes a README.md

with full setup instructions if you

want to run it yourself, plus a sample CSV of synthetic escalation

cases to test against (no real customer data used anywhere in this

project).

The natural extension is Track 2 — instead of feeding it a CSV

manually, connect it directly to a real ticketing system via MCP so

it can pull escalations and analyze them without a manual export

step. That's the version I'd actually want running against my team's

queue.

Built for the Google Cloud Gen AI Academy APAC program, in partnership with Hack2Skill.

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