Agentic orchestration: Reliable, responsible, and visible agentic impact

AI agents are rapidly becoming table stakes for the enterprise. These AI-model-based entities are capable of advanced reasoning, decision making, and continuous learning. When AI agents are empowered to execute complex and dynamic processes end to end, we call this agentic automation. The hype is palpable—90% of U.S. IT executives believe they have business processes that can be improved by agentic AI.

However, agentic automation isn’t a one-person band. Agents need help to get access to the right business data and to produce accurate, reliable decisions. Think of agentic automation as an orchestra. It needs AI agents, automation robots, tools (including AI models), and people working together to deliver transformative outcomes. It’s no surprise that 87% of U.S. IT executives say interoperability between different technologies is important to success. Yet, every orchestra needs a conductor to make sure all the players are keeping time and following the music. With agentic orchestration now in public preview, this level of coordination is within reach.

In this article, I’ll explain why effective orchestration is so important for agentic workflows, and how it can be achieved.

AI agents: obstacles to value

Business leaders and transformation leads are eager to embrace AI agents and embed them into workflows. Indeed, Gartner predicts that agentic AI will make at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions by 2028.

However, the race to adopt and operationalize AI agents is heating up in a context of unprecedented process complexity. The average large company now uses over 230 enterprise applications, with disparate tools for collaboration, project management, and enterprise resource planning, just to name a few. Enterprises have become a complex patchwork of people, tools, and processes that are reliant on masses of unstructured data. This impacts efficiency as data silos form, employees struggle to find the right tools, and incompatible systems create time-consuming bottlenecks.

Business leaders need comprehensive data to make informed decisions and identify the most valuable commercial and improvement opportunities. However, they’re struggling to achieve this due to siloed data and a lack of visibility into their most important processes. A holistic, accurate understanding of their organizations remains a pipedream. This only makes it harder to track, monitor, and improve their change initiatives, restricting their ability to prove ROI and scale agentic AI.

Processes have never been more complex and data more fragmented. But rushing to deploy new AI agents won’t solve these problems. In fact, they could make the challenge worse, adding to the tech bloat and increasing costs while struggling to make a visible impact. Process owners and improvement leads also need to consider the associated data and security risks. There are valid concerns around the reliability of AI agents, which have the same tendency to hallucinate as other generative AI capabilities. Such mistakes are highly risky in enterprise workflows, especially in heavily regulated environments.

Watch how agentic orchestration can transform a payroll process:

Agentic orchestration: scaling agentic AI

Enterprise leaders can unlock enormous value and efficiencies by simplifying and streamlining their processes through agentic automation. However, they need a careful, orchestrated approach that mitigates the risks and ensures AI agents are introduced to critical processes in a secure and scalable way.

Agentic automation needs an orchestration layer to enhance visibility, reduce complexity, and responsibly manage agentic workflows. We call this agentic orchestration, which gives organizations full control over the lifecycle and execution of their business processes.

Agentic orchestration coordinates complex processes across AI agents, robots, and people. In a long-running process comprised of various tasks, it intelligently manages and assigns work to ensure the process is completed smoothly. Think of it as the conductor in a larger symphony, ensuring operations are efficient and aligned with the business’s strategic objectives.

An agentic orchestration platform can reduce process complexity, ease the deployment of AI agents, and enable them to interact with all the tools and systems they need. It provides organizations with the ability to model, implement, operate, monitor, and optimize their long-running processes. Furthermore, it supports vendor consolidation, lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), and breaks down silos between process owners and automation leaders.  

Crucially, agentic orchestration provides a controlled method to integrate agents into processes, where they can work seamlessly alongside robots and people. It enables business leaders to define business rules and guardrails with standard business process model and notation (BPMN). A human in the loop can be easily integrated into agentic processes, ensuring agentic outputs are properly reviewed and enabling people to handle the escalations that AI agents can’t. These measures ensure AI agents act with controlled agency within well-defined process guardrails, maintaining consistency and reliability across operations.

An orchestration platform also serves as a process intelligence layer—empowering you to monitor and continuously optimize agentic workflows. It allows organizations to monitor and continuously optimize their agentic workflows, leveraging real-time data to identify bottlenecks, uncover opportunities, and proactively improve agent performance over time. This data-driven approach ensures that automation and AI initiatives are rooted in expected ROI and tangible business impact.

A nexus for agentic automation and orchestration

Agentic automation cannot succeed without agentic orchestration. UiPath delivers both, enabling you to automate your most complex, critical processes and orchestrate them across systems, end-to-end.

The UiPath Platform™ provides agentic orchestration, coordinating UiPath Agents, third-party AI agents, UiPath Robots, and people across the enterprise. While many business systems offer in-app agents, the UiPath Platform is ideal for cross-system use cases thanks to our first-class integrations with most business systems. This foundation allows us to capture the full observation and context of agentic workflows. Our new agentic orchestration capability enables both compliant execution and autonomous decision making, delivering trusted agents that are governed and observable through our dedicated UiPath AI Trust Layer.

If you’re a UiPath Automation Cloud™ customer, be among the first to explore this new approach—it’s available to try in your UiPath Automation Cloud environment.

Watch this quick guided tour to get started.

If you're not an Automation Cloud customer, you can still try it through the UiPath free trial.