Agent Orchestration
Agent orchestration is the coordination of multiple AI agents by a supervisory system that routes tasks, manages dependencies and information flow, and aggregates results to accomplish a complex multi-step goal.
Agent orchestration refers to the layer of logic—often itself an AI agent—responsible for decomposing a high-level goal into subtasks, assigning those subtasks to appropriate agents, managing the sequencing and parallelism of their execution, and synthesizing their outputs into a coherent result. Orchestration is the connective tissue that turns a collection of agents into a functioning system.
An orchestrator typically maintains a task graph or plan describing which subtasks depend on which, allowing it to schedule independent tasks in parallel and block dependent tasks until prerequisites complete. It handles error cases—retrying failed agents, rerouting to fallbacks, or escalating to a human. The orchestrator also manages context: deciding what information each subagent needs, how results are passed between steps, and when accumulated outputs should be compressed to prevent context overload.
Orchestration patterns range from simple sequential pipelines (step A feeds step B feeds step C) to complex hierarchical trees where an orchestrator delegates to sub-orchestrators, each managing their own workers. Reactive architectures use event-driven orchestration, where agent outputs trigger downstream agents asynchronously. The choice of pattern depends on task structure, latency requirements, and reliability constraints.
By 2026, dedicated orchestration frameworks have matured substantially. LangGraph provides a stateful graph execution model; Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK defines explicit orchestrator and subagent roles with structured handoffs; Microsoft AutoGen supports conversational multi-agent flows. Enterprise deployments routinely run orchestrated pipelines with tens of agents handling tasks such as document intake, classification, extraction, compliance checking, and report generation.