Agent Orchestration

What It Is

Orchestration is the meta-layer that coordinates specialized agents so they divide work, share context, handle failure, and produce a coherent result. The dominant production pattern is orchestrator-workers: a central orchestrator plans, routes, and supervises but does not do the work itself — it decomposes the task, delegates subtasks to worker agents, synthesizes their output, enforces hand-off rules, and decides when to stop.

Topologies

  • Hierarchical / orchestrator-worker — one supervisor with clear control and termination authority. The right default: easy to reason about and debug.
  • Swarm / blackboard — peer agents share memory and hand off peer-to-peer. Suits loosely-coupled, exploratory work; harder to govern.

The orchestrator is also where governance lives: each hand-off is a place for a human-review-gate, and the orchestrator detects and escalates agentic-failure-modes (worker timeout, drift, low confidence).

How It Applies to Marketing Factory

Orchestration is the spine of "a factory that agents can run" — it sequences the per-channel agent-workflow-pattern instances into campaigns, holds the shared brief, routes work by type/difficulty, and decides completion. It is the assembly layer that turns the marketing-factory from metaphor into a runnable system. Its first design rule is restraint (see workflow-vs-agent): use the simplest coordination that works, and it depends on shared-agent-memory to pass state between workers.

Referenced from: marketing-agent-orchestration