Katie Grass

How has your workflow changed since the transformation started?

Customer operations runs on agents now. Tier-1 support — order issues, basic account questions, refund requests — is handled end-to-end by an agentic system with a defined escalation path to human agents for anything that crosses a complexity or sentiment threshold. My team focuses entirely on Tier-2 and above: the situations where policy judgment, merchant relationships, or customer recovery require a real person. The work is harder and more interesting.

What does it mean to operate alongside agents in your function?

I set the boundaries. I define what the agent is authorized to resolve, what it escalates, what it never touches. That requires a precise understanding of our policies, our customer segments, and the failure modes of the model. When the agent makes an error — and it does — I trace it, update the escalation rules, and run it through a regression set before redeploying. That's a different kind of operations management than I trained for.

What would you tell someone considering joining Groupon right now?

If you want to run a traditional call center operation, this is not that. If you want to build and govern an AI-native customer service system — defining what humans own and what agents own, and iterating on that boundary as the technology improves — this is exactly that. I spend more time thinking than I ever did in operations. That's a good sign.