Agents / Standard term
Orchestrator
The central controller in an AI system that decides which model, tool, agent, or human should handle each piece of work, and in what order.
An orchestrator is the central controller in an AI system that decides which model, tool, agent, or human should handle each piece of work, and in what order. In simple systems, it is ordinary code with if/then routing. In more complex systems, a model itself might serve as the orchestrator, reading context and choosing what to do next. A customer-service system might use an orchestrator to route billing questions to one agent, technical issues to another, and escalations to a human supervisor.
Builder example
The orchestrator is where your system's reliability lives: permissions, retry logic, handoff rules, and autonomy budgets. If you cannot point to the orchestrator in your system and explain how it makes routing decisions, you have a gap that will surface as unpredictable behavior in production.
Common confusion: Burying orchestration logic inside a prompt feels elegant, but prompts are probabilistic. If a routing decision needs to be reliable (choosing between "charge the customer" and "escalate to a human"), put that logic in deterministic code.