AI engineering glossary · Agents tools MCP
What is multi-agent system?
Multi-agent system (also called Multi-agent): A setup in which several agents, each with its own role, prompt or tools, cooperate or compete to finish a task. Splitting work this way can improve focus and parallelism, but adds cost, communication overhead and more places to fail.
Multi-agent system: an example
A content system has a researcher agent, a writer agent and an editor agent that pass drafts to each other.
Related terms
- Orchestrator-worker pattern
- Agent handoff
- Supervisor agent
- Agent communication
More Agents tools MCP terms
- OpenAI Agents SDK
- Orchestrator-worker pattern
- Parallelisation pattern
- Plan-and-execute
- Planning (agents)
- Procedural memory
- Program-aided language model
- Read-only tool
Where you learn it
Multi-agent system is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.