Agent Orchestration

What is Agent Orchestration

Agent orchestration is a mechanism for distributing tasks across multiple AI agents while managing the state and coordination flow of each agent. It resolves complex workflows that a single agent cannot handle alone by enabling collaboration among specialized agents.

Why "Orchestration"?

Just as an orchestra conductor controls when each instrument plays and at what tempo, an orchestrator manages "which agent," "when," and "in what order" each agent operates. For example, in a sales support workflow, processing is handed off sequentially: a research agent → a proposal drafting agent → a review agent.

Major Frameworks

Mastra, LangGraph, CrewAI, and others provide orchestration capabilities. Design patterns fall broadly into two categories:

• Sequential pipeline: A serial model in which the output of Agent A becomes the input of Agent B. Predictable and easy to debug.
• Dynamic routing: The next agent to be called is determined dynamically based on results. Flexible, but difficult to control.

Integration with HITL

In practice, rather than automating the entire process, it is recommended to design workflows that incorporate HITL (Human-in-the-Loop) at high-risk decision points. The orchestrator evaluates a confidence score and, when it falls below a threshold, routes the task to a human review queue — this sparse supervision model is a practical solution for balancing autonomy and safety.