Agent orchestration is the coordination layer that manages how agents execute work — routing tasks, maintaining state, handling failures, and enforcing limits across single-agent loops or multi-agent systems.
If the agent loop is "what one agent does step by step," orchestration is "how the whole system runs reliably."
What orchestration handles
- Task routing — Which agent or tool handles this step?
- State management — What happened so far? What's the current status?
- Error recovery — Retry, fallback, or escalate when a step fails
- Parallelism — Running independent steps concurrently
- Human handoffs — Pausing for approval before high-stakes actions
- Observability — Logging, tracing, and cost tracking across steps
Orchestration vs. the agent loop
| Agent loop | Orchestration | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | One agent's perceive-reason-act cycle | The entire workflow |
| Runs in | Model + runtime | Framework or custom coordinator |
| Decides | Next tool call or response | Which agent runs, when to retry, when to stop |
Frameworks like LangGraph, Temporal, and Eve provide orchestration primitives. The choice depends on complexity, team familiarity, and production requirements.
Related reading
See Agent Loop for the inner cycle, and Guardrails for safety boundaries orchestration must enforce.