A project manager is preparing a contingency plan for an Al-driven customer service platform.

PMI-CP–oriented AI risk and resilience practices emphasizecontinuity of service and graceful degradationwhen AI systems fail or are temporarily unavailable. For an AI-driven customer service platform, the contingency plan should ensure that customers still receive some level of assistance even when the main AI system is down. Anautomated fallback chatbot with limited capabilities(option C) embodies this principle by providing a simplified yet always-available channel.

Such a fallback system might offer only basic FAQs, simple intent handling, or routing to human agents, but it maintains a consistent experience and avoids a complete service outage. This is a classic “fail-soft” or “degraded mode” strategy often highlighted in AI operations and MLOps guidance: if the primary model or service is unavailable, the system automaticallyswitches to a simpler, more reliable backup.

Logging systems (option A) are important for diagnosis but do not directly serve customers during downtime. Manual override for critical queries (option B) and extensive staff training (option D) are valuable complementary controls, yet they arehuman-dependentand slower to activate. PMI-style AI contingency planning stressesautomated, pre-defined fallback pathswherever possible. Hence, developing anautomated fallback chatbot with limited capabilitiesbest addresses the objective of handling potential system downtimes.