What is a Workflow Orchestration?

Orchestration is distinct from a single automated task in that it manages dependencies across many moving parts: task B can't start until task A finishes, task C needs to run in parallel with task D, and if task E fails the orchestrator needs to retry it or route to a fallback rather than letting the whole pipeline collapse. Orchestration engines typically model this as a directed graph of steps, tracking the state of each node and only advancing when its prerequisites are satisfied. In multi-agent AI systems specifically, orchestration takes on an extra dimension: deciding which specialized agent or tool should handle a given sub-task, passing context between agents without losing information, and merging their outputs into a single coherent result. This is harder than orchestrating deterministic microservices because agent outputs are probabilistic, so the orchestrator also needs validation logic to catch and correct low-quality intermediate results before they propagate downstream.