Glossary · Updated July 2026

What is Agentic orchestration?

Agentic orchestration is the coordination of autonomous AI agents as they pursue a goal — deciding which agent runs, in what order, with what hand-offs, and how their partial results combine into one outcome. What separates it from a fixed workflow is that the routing itself is dynamic: agents can decompose a task, spawn sub-agents, retry, branch, and negotiate control at runtime rather than following a hard-coded pipeline.

In practice a planner or supervisor agent breaks a goal into steps, dispatches each to the specialist best suited to it, and merges the results — adapting the plan as evidence comes back. The same machinery handles failure: a step that errors is retried, rerouted, or escalated instead of collapsing the run.

Agentic orchestration answers who does what, when. It says nothing about what each agent is allowed to touch, what it remembers between runs, or what record it leaves behind — which is why orchestration alone is necessary but not sufficient for running agents you can trust.

How it relates to agent management

Agentic orchestration is one layer inside AI agent management — it schedules the work, the way scheduling meetings is one layer inside managing a team. Management adds the permissions, memory, review, and audit that orchestration leaves untouched.