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Glossary
Agent orchestration
Agent orchestration is the coordination of multiple agents, tools, models, and control policies so that work is routed, sequenced, supervised, and composed toward outcomes. Orchestration covers scheduling, handoffs, shared memory or state, conflict handling, and escalation — not the internals of a single agent loop alone.
Why it matters
One agent with a few tools can automate a narrow job. Enterprise processes cross systems, roles, and risk tiers. Orchestration becomes the control plane: which agent acts, in what order, with what context, under what approvals, and how failures retry or escalate.
Without orchestration, “multi-agent” estates become brittle swarms: duplicated actions, missing handoffs, and no owner for end-to-end SLAs. Orchestration may be implemented with workflow engines, supervisor agents, graphs, or platform control planes — the concept is the coordination responsibility.
Example (enterprise): A claims process uses a retrieval agent for policy passages, an assessment agent for draft decisions, and a payments agent for disbursement. An orchestration layer sequences them, blocks payment without human-in-the-loop approval above a limit, and records an audit trail across steps.
Mechanisms
- Routing and sequencing — assign subgoals to capable agents/tools in a valid order.
- Shared state — pass artifacts, memory, and permissions between steps without leaking excess data.
- Supervision — monitors, budgets (time/cost/tokens), retries, and escalation paths.
Boundaries
- Agent orchestration ≠ a single AI agent’s internal plan-act loop (though a supervisor agent may implement orchestration).
- Agent orchestration ≠ Agentic AI branding; orchestration is an engineering/control concern.
- Orchestration does not remove the need for human decision rights on consequential outcomes.
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