glossary
AI Orchestration
Control of step ordering, branching, state and fault tolerance in an AI workflow.
AI orchestration is the control of step ordering, branching, retries, state and termination conditions in a workflow where some steps are performed by a language model. The orchestrator keeps workflow state outside any single model call and makes behavior reproducible, observable and resilient to failure.
How it differs from the naive version: a “model wrapper” is one stateless call with all logic hidden in a single growing prompt, and you cannot explain after the fact why the system answered as it did. In orchestration, state and transitions between steps are explicit, every step has a contract, and handoff to a human is provided at critical points.
Why it matters: it is precisely the presence of explicit state and traceable transitions that separates a system you can trust with operations and still debug a year later from a demo that works until the first non-standard case.