Orchestrating AI Agents: The Key to Unlocking Enterprise Efficiency and GrowthOrchestrating AI Agents: The Key to Unlocking Enterprise Efficiency and Growth

Businesses must overcome siloed workflows and enhance system-wide efficiency through agent orchestration

Dorit Zilbershot, Group vice president, AI experiences and innovation, ServiceNow

February 4, 2025

6 Min Read
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As generative AI transforms industries, there's a growing demand for intelligent systems capable of planning and executing complex, content-sensitive tasks. 

Rising to meet this demand is the next wave of generative AI innovation, agentic AI. It represents a fundamental shift in how we will interact with AI at work and beyond. Unlike traditional models that respond to basic queries or tasks, agentic AI interprets user-defined goals, develops strategic plans, and autonomously executes actions across various domains—all with minimal human intervention. 

In fact, Gartner identifies agentic AI as one of the top trends organizations must explore in 2025, predicting it will automate at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions. However, to unlock the full potential of agentic AI, businesses need to address the often siloed implementations that hold them back from effectively managing tasks, optimizing for efficiency, and enhancing outcomes.

Solving for the Challenges of Decentralized AI Agents

Generative AI is increasingly integrated piecemeal throughout the enterprise, often due to budget constraints or prioritization. This, in turn, leads to decentralized agentic AI architectures, which have benefits and challenges.

Specialized AI agents in the enterprise are purpose-built, intelligent systems designed to autonomously handle specific tasks or workflows within a particular domain or function. When used for automating repetitive tasks, for example, specialized AI agents shine. They also excel at streamlining operations and minimizing (or even eliminating) human error.

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However, in these isolated silos, they lack a broader, holistic understanding of the business context, including how their tasks interconnect within larger organizational processes. As a result, their work can become fragmented. Moreover, when a single AI agent makes an error, it can have cascading effects that potentially disrupt entire operational workflows. For organizations to maximize the value of agentic AI investments, they must learn how to better harness and implement AI agents.

Picture an orchestra performing a complex symphony. Each musician plays a vital role and can perform flawlessly alone, but without a conductor, it's chaos. Akin to a conductor not necessarily knowing how to play every instrument but ensuring the symphony comes together beautifully, orchestrator agents can solve for the limitations of decentralized agentic AI systems.

Imagine having a “managerial” AI agent that can be like an expert conductor—coordinating all the individual players (data, actions, and workflows) and ensuring everything works in harmony. When orchestrator agents oversee and manage multi-agent systems, specialized AI agents can come together to solve complex, cross-functional challenges and achieve results that no single AI agent could accomplish on its own.

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This enables seamless collaboration across departments and applications, allowing agentic AI systems to better anticipate needs, adjust in real time, and keep the performance of an enterprise running smoothly. When you combine multiple specialized AI agents with orchestration, you're not just adding their individual skills—you're unleashing a level of collective intelligence that multiplies their potential and achieves far more.

Fueling Scalable, Agile Business Growth

Effective orchestration of AI agents is key to scaling operations across large enterprises with complex environments. Unlike individual agents, which operate within narrow silos, orchestrator agents possess contextual intelligence, allowing them to understand broader systems and interdependencies.

This interconnected efficiency simplifies complex workflows and helps businesses scale by automating tasks across diverse functions—whether in IT, human resources, customer service, supply chains, finance, or more. This also enables orchestrator agents to identify and isolate potential disruptions early on, strategically mitigating risk and preventing system-wide failures.

Orchestrator agents empower businesses to scale, adapt quickly, and maintain high efficiency by ensuring that agentic AI systems work together cohesively, which ultimately drives sustainable growth. It's like having a team that knows exactly who to loop in and what expertise is needed to address any ask—from onboarding a new employee to organizing a team event to autonomously solving a customer issue. Agent orchestration brings precision and ease to even the most complex operations.

Driving Adaptability and Flexibility

With agent orchestration, businesses can properly leverage the expertise of every specialized AI agent—balancing workloads, identifying bottlenecks, and assigning tasks based on priority or expertise. This enhances organizational adaptability by effectively allocating AI resources across operations.

Deploying agent orchestration frameworks ensures that the right tools are used for the right tasks, minimizing wasted resources and optimizing the deployment of specialized AI agents. Processes then run more smoothly with little human oversight, reducing the need for manual intervention. This also empowers businesses to adapt quickly to changing conditions. This is because orchestrator agents can predict disruptions in real time—such as supply chain delays or unexpected demand spikes—and adjust resources on the fly.

This enhanced adaptability not only allows enterprises to maintain business continuity, but also strengthens their ability to innovate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they arise.

Simplifying Complexity with Smarter, More Intuitive Interfaces

Orchestrator agents act as a bridge between backend infrastructure and user-facing front ends, transforming complex systems into more intuitive and user-friendly experiences. By streamlining communication, agent orchestration can help non-experts interact with sophisticated systems, reducing cognitive overload and making agentic AI systems more accessible.

Agent orchestration introduces a new paradigm in how humans and machines interact and collaborate. Instead of the traditional "human-in-the-loop” approach, where humans are deeply involved in every process step, we shift to a "human-on-the-loop” model. With this new model, AI agents take the lead in executing tasks, making decisions, and coordinating actions autonomously. The human's role evolves to one of oversight and intervention, and only when necessary.

This shift allows the AI agent to handle routine, repetitive, or time-intensive tasks while freeing up humans to focus on high-level strategy, creativity, and problem-solving. The collaboration between these specialized AI agents under an agent orchestration framework ensures seamless communication, coordination, and execution, enabling humans and machines to work together more efficiently than ever before.

Preparing for the Next Wave of Generative AI Innovation

As organizations look to scale and adapt in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, it's critical to future-proof their generative AI strategies. This means implementing strong governance frameworks that not only manage current AI systems but also anticipate future advancements with agentic AI. Clear policies for data management, transparency, and accountability can ensure that new technologies align with organizational goals and standards.

Businesses should also assess their current generative AI implementations to identify pain points where agent orchestration frameworks can streamline productivity. For example, using this technology to identify redundancy between AI agents with focused functionalities unleashes greater cross-functional collaboration that maximizes AI agents' capabilities.

To realize the value and transformation impact of AI agents, businesses must overcome siloed workflows and enhance system-wide efficiency through agent orchestration. Ultimately, embracing orchestration will help businesses make the most of their investments, scale, and maintain adaptability in this dynamic landscape.

About the Author

Dorit Zilbershot

Group vice president, AI experiences and innovation, ServiceNow, ServiceNow

Dorit Zilbershot is a seasoned professional in the tech industry, known for her expertise in product development and management. With a strong background in computer science, she has been instrumental in driving forward technological solutions, with a special focus on AI. Throughout her career, Dorit has focused on innovating and improving product offerings while mentoring young professionals in the field. Recently, Dorit played a strategic role in integrating generative AI, including agentic AI, into ServiceNow's products, supporting ServiceNow's mission to put AI to work.

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