The AI Coordination Revolution You Haven't Heard About Yet

Forbes

11-04-2025

Coordinated, orchestrated and ready to go.
Breakthroughs don't always arrive with a bang or a flash of inspiration.
Sometimes, they come in the form of quietly made connections, wires carefully laid between sparks we had already had.
The AI revolution has given us no shortage of sparks. So many, in fact, that it's easy to lose count. It started with large language models, unlocking the power of general-purpose text generation.
Just as we were getting comfortable with prompting, another shift appeared: AI agents, built not just to respond, but to take action on our behalf.
From customer service to code generation, we saw tools like LangChain and AutoGPT explode in use cases, with one company after another dashing to find use for their Agents.
But we quickly ran into a wall: these agents didn't talk to each other. They acted alone without coordination, like ships passing in the night.
Given how rapidly things have evolved with AI it would be a fool's errand to try to predict the future, but one thing is for sure: the next frontier in AI isn't going to be as simple as creating increasingly smart agents.
Instead, it will require unlocking their ability to collaborate, just like humans do.
And that's where agentic orchestration comes in.
Remember how just a few years ago autocomplete felt magical?
Now, instead of making guesses at the next word we have AI agents drafting our emails, optimizing our workflows, and handling customer engagements for us. This acceleration from prediction to action has been stunning, and it has happened faster than most people get promoted on the job.
Just like we've reached the limits of training data available for foundational model providers, we're also getting closer to reaching the limits of siloed agents.
Most enterprises now face a growing web of tools with the average enterprise having more than 360 SaaS applications deployed at any given time. Although each promises to be a part of the digital transformation, few work in concert to actually make life easier for clients.
The same holds for the agentic revolution as well, where the sum of the parts is becoming a morass clients can find difficult to move forward effectively in.
Enterprises are building agents on different platforms ranging from LangChain, Salesforce, Anthropic to OpenAI and the challenge isn't the quality of each, it's their lack of cohesion and ability to coordinate.
'Many of our clients come with agents,' says Matt Wood, who helps lead PwC's AI efforts.
"They are already seeing results, and next they want them organized. There's so much breadth in how clients work with these. Once we got structure in place, plans, playbooks, the ability to iterate, that's when we saw 10x improvement in how fast and well agents could be built.'
This is where agentic orchestration comes in.
The concept is exactly what it sounds like: creating the conditions for many agents to collaborate toward a shared goal. Instead of a single AI doing a single task, it's multiple AI systems coordinating across departments, domains, and decisions.
PwC's new agent OS is designed to do just that, and it is the first mover in a space that is likely to see many entrants in the near future.
What solutions like PwC's agent OS do is connect agents, regardless of their tech stack, into structured, adaptive workflows. Then, it lets them talk to each other, exchanging information about the task and goals, all the while the humans remain on the loop managing it all as necessary.
When done right, orchestration sets boundaries and limits on the AI, allowing them to focus, if not specialize almost as if they had read Adam Smith's example of the pin factory.
'We found that the more constrained the agents are, the better they perform,' says Wood.
'Agents do better when they are asked to go on deliberate expeditions with a clear goal instead of exploration. Once we shifted our mindset from building agents to orchestrating them, we built 250+ across every function. And more importantly, they worked together.'
The results aren't just theoretical.
As Paul Griggs, PwC's US Senior Partner, puts it: ' we're helping organizations scale AI agents with confidence, speed, and purpose and it's a real game-changer for how our clients' work gets done.'
Clearly there's great power in coordination between agents, and there's space for humans to pitch in too.
Much of the hype around AI is focused on the rather natural, albeit somewhat overblown, fears of AI replacing humans.
For those who are ready to welcome our robotic overlords and submit to a life of involuntary leisure, Paul offers reassurance that us humans still have our role to play. 'There's no question whether the future of work is in human-AI collaboration.'
To understand what the future of work will look like, it helps to understand the evolving relationship between humans and machines.
Overall, there will be three main modes of interacting with agentic AI:
These distinctions are more than academic, but getting the nuances across to an audience that is still coming to terms with AI is its own challenge.
'You see peoples' eyes gloss over when you use terms such as 'multi-agent orchestration,'' says IBM's Karl Haller.
'But if you show them how their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can be turned into code, and the efficiency improvements that come from that, they get it pretty fast.'
Haller sees the real opportunity of orchestration in codifying business logic.
'The future of AI is where your Visio diagram becomes executable code. It's where the question, answer, and action are all linked. That's when an agent goes from being a tool to being a teammate.'
It's no wonder that every major firm seems to be building some flavor of orchestration layer.
But when you ask around, as analyst Usman Sheikh, Managing Director at High Output Ventures, seeing the full picture remains difficult.
'There's a flurry of announcements,' Sheikh tells us.
'But when I ask people at these firms to provide actual case studies or examples they are far and few between. The marketing is often ahead of the implementation.'
This insight brings us back to a key point in the AI revolution that many companies are still grappling with: trust.
'We get a lot of questions about agents and whether they can be trusted to do the work right,' says Matt Wood.
'Orchestration with the right guardrails and the knowledge sources connected is what makes the difference. That's what scales, because users can see that it's trustworthy instead of companies just marketing it as such.'
If an AI agent books your flight, handles your taxes, or flags a compliance issue, you need to know it's acting in alignment with enterprise standards.
That's why baking in governance and guardrails will be part-and-parcel in making any orchestration system work.
'We made a priority of governance with PwC's agent OS', Wood explains.
'It integrates with our risk frameworks, ensuring oversight without friction, and we've opened up the black box of AI as much as possible. Non-technical teams can use drag-and-drop interfaces, agents can be edited, updated, and monitored without a PhD.'
A single agent is a tool.
A fleet of agents, orchestrated with precision and aligned to outcomes, that's infrastructure.
And for organizations ready to move beyond the hype and into real AI transformation, the future is already arriving.
It's agentic. It's orchestrated.
And it's ready to push us humans consistently ahead of the curve.