Agent orchestration is the layer that decides which agent (or which step) handles which part of a task — coordinating multiple agents, tools, and humans toward an outcome.
Agent orchestration is the conductor in a multi-agent system. When several agents could plausibly handle a step, the orchestrator decides which one does. When an agent finishes its part, the orchestrator decides whether to pass the result to another agent, escalate to a human, or finish. It's the layer that makes a collection of agents into a working team.
Orchestration handles four things. Routing — sending each input to the right agent. Sequencing — deciding the order of steps. Coordination — sharing context so agents know what others have already done. Escalation — knowing when to stop and ask a human or stop entirely.
Without orchestration, multi-agent systems collapse into chaos: agents stepping on each other, doing duplicate work, missing handoffs, going in circles. With good orchestration, the same agents act like a team that's worked together for years.
A buyer asks a real-estate agent: "homes near a good school under £800k". Orchestration routes the question to the listing-search agent first (find homes under £800k in the area), then to a school-rating agent (filter by school catchment quality), then to a composer agent (write the response that combines the two results into a single recommendation). The buyer sees one coherent answer — not three.
Multi-agent systems without orchestration are demos, not products. The moment you need agents to work together on real workloads, orchestration is what makes the difference between a system that ships and one that doesn't.
For non-technical operators, orchestration is mostly invisible — you don't think about it directly, you just notice that the system handles complex requests cleanly. The platform you choose either has good orchestration baked in or it doesn't; building your own from scratch is a significant engineering project.
The risk in poorly designed orchestration is brittleness in unexpected cases. If the orchestrator can't route something, the whole system stalls. Strong orchestration includes a default fallback — usually "hand to a human" — so unfamiliar inputs don't break the experience.
Squidgy's orchestration layer is built in. You compose multiple agents, define handoffs, set escalation rules, and the platform runs the coordination. You don't write orchestration code; you describe the team and the rules in plain English, and Ace builds it.
Common patterns we ship with: sequential pipelines (agent A → agent B → agent C), router-and-specialist (one router agent dispatches to many specialists), and human-in-the-loop (agents draft, human approves before send).
Related but different. A workflow is the recipe — the steps and the order. Orchestration is the conductor — what makes the recipe actually run, including handling cases the recipe didn't anticipate. Workflows can be deterministic; orchestration usually involves judgement.
Not really — a single agent doesn't need much coordination. You start needing orchestration the moment you add a second agent or a meaningful escalation path.
Yes — many platforms ship visual orchestration canvases where you draw the agent network. On Squidgy you can also describe the orchestration in plain English to Ace and have the visual generated for review.
Routing usually breaks first — the orchestrator picks the wrong agent for an input. The fix is sharper agent descriptions and routing rules. After that, context-sharing breaks — agent B doesn't know what agent A learned. The fix is shared memory and explicit handoffs.
Glossary
What is Multi-agent system?
A multi-agent system uses several specialised AI agents that each handle part of a task, coordinated by an orchestrator — like a team rather than a soloist.
Glossary
What is Agentic workflow?
An agentic workflow is a process where AI agents make some of the decisions about what to do next — instead of just executing fixed steps you laid out in advance.
Glossary
What is AI agent?
An AI agent is software that takes a goal, decides what steps to take, uses tools to do them, and carries the work out with little or no human prodding between steps.
Glossary
What is Agent builder?
An agent builder is a tool for creating AI agents — defining what they do, what tools they can use, and how they decide — without writing all the code yourself.
No code. Hands-on onboarding from the team in your first cohort.