Designing Multi-Agent Systems for the Enterprise

Start with a single orchestrator

Resist the urge to let agents call each other directly. A single orchestrator that routes requests to specialist agents keeps the system debuggable and makes it possible to reason about failure modes.

Specialize narrowly

Agents that try to do everything perform worse than narrow specialists composed together. A support agent, a sales agent, and a knowledge agent each grounded in their own domain outperform one generalist agent grounded in everything.

Design for graceful escalation

Every agent needs a clear, well-tested path to hand off to a human — with full context carried over, not a cold handoff. This is the difference between an agent employees trust and one they route around.

Instrument everything

Log every tool call, every retrieval, and every model response. When an agent gets something wrong in production, you need to reconstruct exactly what it saw and did — logs are the difference between a five-minute fix and a multi-day investigation.