Multi-Agent Orchestration
The coordination of several specialized agents working toward a shared goal.
Multi-agent orchestration is the coordination of several specialized agents working toward a shared goal. The patterns and primitives are still being worked out in public; expect this entry to evolve as the field's vocabulary hardens.
The principal orchestration patterns currently in use are the CEO-agent pattern (a central coordinator decomposes, assigns, and synthesizes), the pipeline pattern (agents execute in a fixed sequence with no central coordinator), the peer-handoff pattern (agents pass work directly to each other based on local routing decisions), and a small but growing number of hybrid patterns that combine elements. None has yet emerged as the obvious right answer for every workload; different workloads favor different patterns.
The questions to ask when evaluating a multi-agent design are: where does decomposition happen, where does synthesis happen, how is state passed between agents, where do human reviews fit, and what happens when an agent fails or stalls. Designs that have clean answers to all five questions tend to ship. Designs that have fuzzy answers tend to demo well and ship poorly. The complexity of multi-agent orchestration is one reason the CEO-agent pattern has become a popular default in the marketing-workload context — it produces clean answers to most of these questions by construction.
See also
- CEO Agent — An orchestration-layer agent that decomposes a goal into specialist work, assigns the work, monitors progress, and synthesizes results.
- Specialist Agent — An agent configured for a specific function — research, copy, paid-media analysis, brief-writing.
- Agentic Workflow — A defined sequence of agent-executed steps that produces a marketing output.
- Handoff — The transfer of state, context, and ownership between two agents in a workflow.
- Agentic Workforce — The full set of agents an organization runs to do work that would otherwise be done by humans or scripts.