The orchestrator is the decision-maker in a multi-agent system. It receives the overall goal, determines which agents are needed and in what order, passes context and data between them, monitors execution, and handles failures.
A customer escalation process might involve agents for sentiment detection, CRM lookup, policy retrieval, and response drafting. The orchestrator decides which to call, in what sequence, and what to pass between them. Without an orchestrator, you have a collection of agents but no coherent system connecting them.
