Definition
Agent orchestration is Agent orchestration is the software layer that starts, coordinates and supervises one or more AI agents, deciding who does which task, keeping their work separate and combining the results.
One AI agent can handle one task. Real work often needs several at once: one fixing a bug, another writing tests, a third updating documentation. Agent orchestration is the layer that manages them. It launches agents, hands out tasks, keeps their work from colliding and gathers what they produce so a person can review it.
Think of a kitchen. The cooks do the cooking, and the head chef decides who makes what, in what order, and what leaves the kitchen. Orchestration is the head chef.
Typical jobs include:
An agent harness runs a single agent's loop: it calls the model, runs its tool calls and manages its memory. Orchestration sits above that and coordinates many harnesses. The two ideas overlap in small systems, but they answer different questions: how does one agent work, and how do several agents work together.
When you run more than one agent, the hard part stops being the model and becomes management. Without orchestration, agents duplicate effort, conflict over shared resources and leave you reviewing a pile of unrelated changes. Good orchestration also gives you one place to apply rules, watch costs and use an emergency stop such as an AI kill switch.
Orchestration is the practical side of a multi-agent system, and it is a core part of agentic coding when several coding agents work on one project.
It is the software that coordinates multiple AI agents, assigning tasks, keeping their work separate and combining results.
A harness runs one agent's loop. Orchestration coordinates several agents and their harnesses.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called on Saturday for an AI "emergency brake": controls outside the model, tamper-proof logs and a human who can stop a task mid-run. Treat it as a checklist for your own agents, not a press line.
Microsoft says its MAI-DxO diagnostic system got 83% of 304 complex NEJM cases right, against 36% for physicians with references, in a study published in Science. The orchestrator gets the headline. The model underneath does most of the work.
GitHub made Copilot Fusion generally available on Oct. 28 on every Copilot plan: you pick an effort level, and it routes each prompt across models. The model picker just became a setting most of you can stop touching.
Conductor, the app that runs several coding agents at once, is joining Meta, and its cloud goes read-only Nov. 13 and shuts Nov. 20. If you use it, your export deadline is two weeks away.