Orchestrator Agent
In one line
An orchestrator agent is the top-level agent that schedules sub-agents, assigns roles and enforces stop conditions — the control tower of a multi-agent system.
Going deeper
An orchestrator agent is the supervisor in a multi-agent system. It decides which sub-agent gets which task, how to merge their outputs and when to stop. Anthropic's Multi-agent Research System and OpenAI Swarm both make this role explicit.
In a marketing workflow it plays the role of an 'agent PM'. For content production, it hands off from research to copywriting at the right moment and routes failures back to research if the brand-guide review flags an issue.
A good orchestrator gives you tight control over the whole system. A bad one becomes the bottleneck. The pattern that holds up best is letting sub-agents make routine decisions on their own and bubbling only the high-leverage branches up to the orchestrator.
Related terms
Multi-Agent System
A multi-agent system is several AI agents with different roles cooperating on the same task — used when one agent alone is not enough to solve the problem.
AI AgentPlanning Agent
A planning agent is an agent that first drafts a multi-step plan for a goal and then executes it step by step, calling tools as needed.
AI AgentA2A
A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) is Google-led standard for letting agents from different vendors delegate work to each other and exchange results.
AI AgentAI Agent
An AI agent is an LLM-driven system that takes a goal, plans the steps, calls the tools it needs and runs the task end-to-end with limited human input.
AI AgentHuman-in-the-Loop
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is the design pattern where an agent runs autonomously but routes critical decisions through a human for review and approval.
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