What is an Agent Orchestration?

A single agent handles a single, roughly self-contained task well; orchestration is what's needed once a goal is bigger than one agent should reasonably own — it decomposes the goal into sub-tasks, decides which specialized agent (or human) handles each one, manages dependencies between them (some sub-tasks can run in parallel, others must wait on a prior result), and merges the outputs back into one coherent deliverable. The orchestrator itself is often just another agent, but one whose job is planning and delegation rather than direct execution — it holds the overall plan, tracks which sub-tasks are done versus pending, and decides when to escalate to a human rather than doing the work itself. Getting orchestration right means avoiding both extremes: a single overloaded agent trying to do everything, and an uncoordinated swarm of agents stepping on each other's work with no shared plan or ownership of the final result.