Beginner's guide to multi-agent orchestration with watsonx Orchestrate

As enterprise workflows grow increasingly complex, a single AI agent often struggles to meet the demands of real-world automation. Organizations are increasingly turning to multi-agent systems with interoperating AI agents that collaborate to solve larger tasks more effectively. In this article, explore what AI agent orchestration means, why it matters, and how watsonx Orchestrate helps developers to build powerful, multi-agent workflows without writing complex orchestration logic.

What is AI agent orchestration?

With generative AI and task-specific models becoming more capable, organizations are finding innovative ways to combine them to handle intricate tasks. AI agent orchestration is the process of coordinating multiple autonomous AI agents to work together as a cohesive system, much like a conductor leading an orchestra.

Take, for example, an enterprise workflow such as employee onboarding. One AI agent might gather candidate information, another initiates background checks, and third sets up IT access. Orchestration can ensure that these agents are triggered at the right time, share data seamlessly, and handle errors gracefully. Unlike simple automation, where tasks run independently, orchestration connects agents to share context, maintain state, and manage dependencies throughout the workflow.

So, how is orchestration different from simple automation? Unlike isolated automation tasks that run independently, orchestration connects multiple agents so they can share context, maintain state, and manage dependencies throughout the workflow. It governs not only the order in which tasks run, but also enables dynamic decision-making. For example, orchestrated systems can include conditional logic to handle different scenarios, retry mechanisms to recover from failures, and fallback paths to keep the process resilient and adaptable.

While orchestrators have long managed microservices and batch jobs, applying these principles to AI agents is a game-changer. Developers can compose reusable AI agents such as building blocks, each specialized for a specific task, making workflows modular and adaptable as business needs evolve.

How watsonx Orchestrate enables agent orchestration

So, how do you put multi-agent orchestration into practice? Let’s look at how watsonx Orchestrate handles the heavy lifting for you.

watsonx Orchestrate is designed to make AI agent orchestration practical and accessible. It provides an agent-centric architecture that lets you develop, compose, and run multiple AI agents as part of a coordinated workflow without needing an external workflow engine or custom integration glue code.

watsonx Orchestrate treats agents as modular, reusable services that can perform reasoning, integrate with systems, or delegate tasks to other agents. Here are a few core features that make orchestration work in watsonx Orchestrate:

• Nested agent calls: With watsonx Orchestrate, one agent can invoke another as part of its action logic. This enables you to build hierarchical agent structures, where high-level agents break down tasks and delegate subtasks to specialized child agents. For example, a Procure Equipment agent might delegate work to agents such as Request Quotes, Evaluate Vendors, and Submit Purchase Request. Each agent handles its own piece, but watsonx Orchestrate keeps everything connected behind the scenes, so you don’t need to manually link them with extra code.

• Sequencing and control flow: Watsonx Orchestrate supports multi-step agents that can run tasks in order, handle conditions, and retry steps when needed. You can create workflows where each agent’s output becomes the input for the next, or set up paths that adapt based on what an agent finds. This means that you can build complex, flexible logic without having to write orchestration rules from scratch.

• Context propagation: All agents in watsonx Orchestrate share a workspace context, which acts like a memory buffer that carries information from step-to-step. This includes user input, agent results, and other data that is needed to complete the workflow. This built-in context passing means agents can talk to each other and work with full awareness of what’s already happened with no custom storage or manual tracking required.

• Reusable agent catalog: watsonx Orchestrate offers a catalog of pre-built agents specialized in business domains such as HR and Procurement. These plug-and-play agents can be slotted into workflows or used as templates for custom agents. Developers can create agents by using the no-code Agent Builder or the pro-code Agent Development Kit (ADK) and publish them to the catalog, fostering a growing library of reusable AI building blocks.

What a multi-agent orchestration looks like in practice

Now that we've explored some of watsonx Orchestrate's core orchestration features, including nested agent calls, shared context, and reusable agent catalogs, let's see what these capabilities would look like in action. What does multi-agent orchestration truly look like when applied to a real-world enterprise workflow?

The following diagram illustrates a real-world orchestration flow.

In this scenario, a sales executive uses a conversational copilot as the client layer to prepare for a critical customer meeting. Instead of manually searching for information, the executive gives a prompt:

“I have a meeting with the CRO of Adobe on Friday. Let me see what the company’s latest offering is that I can present to him.”

This prompt triggers the entire orchestration. The copilot forwards the request to an Orchestrator Agent within watsonx Orchestrate. Acting as the primary conductor, the Orchestrator Agent, the Sales Agent in this case, processes the request and begins its “Plan, Act, Reflect” cycle.

Here’s how the Sales Agent breaks down the task:

• Analyze Adobe’s current entitlements (using SAP Ariba)
• Check support ticket status (using ServiceNow)
• Identify new offerings (via web and Seismic search)
• Create a tailored presentation
• Draft and send an email to the CRO with the presentation attached (via a Salesforce SDR Agent)

After the planning phase is complete, the Sales Agent moves to the Act phase, orchestrating various specialized agents, or Collaborators. watsonx Orchestrate allows AI agents to be exposed as tools, enabling agents to call other agents to execute multiple tasks. In this workflow, the Sales Agent calls:

• A Salesforce SDR Agent to connect with Salesforce.
• A Support Analysis Agent to connect with ServiceNow.
• A Presentation Agent, trained to create presentations.

These Collaborators, in turn, use tools. These tools are the foundational capabilities that connect to APIs, workflows, data sources, and other essential systems, allowing the agents to perform their specialized functions and gather the necessary information for the sales executive.

Additionally, this scenario also highlights watsonx Orchestrate's agnostic stance regarding agent consumption and integration. It illustrates how watsonx Orchestrate allows you to consume AI agents built with its platform in other external application, such as Copilot in this example, and conversely, integrate agents or tools from diverse platforms into an Orchestrate-managed workflow.

Multi-agent orchestration in action

To see how these concepts come together in the real world, check out this short demo video. In this scenario, a sales manager goes through their day by using multiple AI agents within watsonx Orchestrate to handle tasks that would normally take a lot of time.

Summary and next steps

Orchestration connects agents to share context, manage dependencies, and handle tasks sequentially. Multi-agent orchestration enables AI agents to collaborate on complex tasks by sharing context and managing dependencies across workflows. IBM watsonx Orchestrate supports this through features such as nested agent calls, flexible control flow, and a shared workspace. A real-world sales scenario illustrated how different agents can collaborate to complete a task.

To get started with multi-agent orchestration:

• Explore the watsonx Orchestrate documentation for setup guides and examples.

• Dive into the details about the Agent Development Kit (ADK).

• Start your free trial to build and run your own orchestrated workflows in minutes.

Multi-agent orchestration isn’t just the future of automation, it’s available today! Agnostic by design, and ready for you to build on.