Agent Orchestration

Agent orchestration is the coordination of models, tools, state, and control flow within an agentic workflow. It determines which component acts next, what information it receives, how results are combined, and when execution should stop or require human approval.

Orchestration may be implemented in deterministic application code, delegated to a supervisor AI agent, or split between both. Production systems often use code for hard constraints and let models make decisions where semantic judgment or flexible planning is required.

Typical orchestration responsibilities include:

• routing requests to specialized models or agents;
• sequencing and parallelizing subtasks;
• managing tool calls;
• transferring control through agent handoffs;
• maintaining shared and agent-specific state;
• enforcing budgets for time, tokens, and external actions;
• retrying transient failures without repeating consequential operations; and
• collecting traces for debugging and agent evaluation.

Common topologies include a central supervisor with specialist workers, a pipeline of fixed stages, a peer-to-peer group of agents, and an event-driven architecture where agents react to state changes. Multi-agent designs can improve specialization and parallelism, but they also create coordination overhead, duplicated work, inconsistent state, and more complex failure modes.

Effective orchestration depends on explicit contracts. Agent inputs and outputs should use structured output where possible. State ownership, authorization boundaries, termination conditions, and error semantics should be defined independently of model prompts.

Context isolation is another important design decision. Giving every agent the complete execution history is simple but expensive and can reduce focus. Context engineering instead provides each component with only the information needed for its role, while durable facts are stored in agent memory.

Protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardize access to tools and context. The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) addresses communication and coordination between independently implemented agents.