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Capability 01 · Agent Orchestration

Compose agents into governed work

Cortx turns single agent runs into larger units of work. One agent hands a sub-task to another, a run fans out into parallel steps, a workflow strings agents and people together with maker and checker steps, and a supervisor drives a team of agents through a plan. Every hand-off moves work, never authority.

Agent CatalogDiscover and create custom agents.
Create Agent
12Agents live
3Awaiting a checker
48Hand-offs today
How work is composed

From one agent run to a team of agents

People, schedules and outside agents start the work. Cortx composes it six ways, under one set of controls.

Who starts the work
Business usersIn chat and Microsoft Teams
Workflow authorsIn Flow Studio or with the Workflow Builder agent
Schedules and triggersWorkflows that start on their own
Checkers and approversFrom an email link or the task inbox
Outside agentsCopilot Studio or any A2A peer
Agent Orchestration
How it's composed
Sub-agentsA run hands a sub-task to a child agent
A2A hand-offsDelegate to another agent, inside or outside Cortx
Agents as toolsOne agent called as a tool of another
Parallel stepsA run fans out, then joins
Workflow graphsAgents and people, with maker and checker steps
Supervisor runsA supervisor drives a team through a plan
The one rule

A hand-off moves work,
never authority.

Every composed run, whether a child, a delegate, a workflow step or a member of a supervisor's team, holds no more authority than its caller held and it was granted, passes the same per-tool controls as a top-level turn, and is owned by a worker that outlives whoever started it.

Six ways work is composed
Sub-agentschild runs
A2A hand-offsinside and outside Cortx
Agents as toolscalled by another agent
Parallel stepsfan out, then join
Workflow graphsmaker and checker steps
Supervisor runsa team through a plan

Four steps run around every composed run. Each step hands the next what is on its arrow. Select a step to jump to it.

01 · Compose

Six ways to compose work: sub-agents, A2A hand-offs, agents as tools, parallel steps, workflow graphs and supervisor runs.

02 · Carry

Two engines divide the work. A durable workflow engine carries work across agents, people and days; the agent runtime carries the inside of each run: plan, act, reflect, steer, park.

03 · Govern

Once armed, each hand-off is decided against intersecting scopes, depth, cycles and allowlisted edges. Each tool call passes the guardrail chain. Each checker step is a human task with an expiring, single-use approval link.

04 · Record

Hand-offs land on the ledger, delegation chains are measured on every A2A call, and the run graph and workflow history each record their half.

Three tests for every composed run

A composition that fails any one of them is not governed, however good its parts are.

  • Authority intersect, never inherit
  • Control one chain per tool call
  • Ownership the worker owns the run

Every orchestration control ships in observe mode first, so you see what it would decide before you arm it.

Agents and people

One workflow.
Agents and people, governed together.

Workflow graphs

Maker and checker, with a real second person

Workflows put people in the loop. A checker step is a human task with an expiring, single-use approval link, and a quorum counts distinct, authenticated people, not names in a payload.

A2A hand-offs

Authority is computed, never copied

A delegate gets what was requested, intersected with what its caller held and what the callee allows. The callee re-decides from a signed lineage, and outside agents get no user token, history or state.

Agent builder

Business teams build, under the same controls

Teams build agents in five steps in the Agent Catalog, without code. Their agents load through the same loader and tool wrapper as the agents we ship.

Orchestration your risk team
can sign off on

How authority, control and ownership hold when agents hand work to each other.

Intersect, never inherit

A delegate's authority is computed from what was requested, what its caller held and what it was granted. A forwarded user token is a credential for one hop, never a grant.

One chain per tool call

A tool reached through a sub-agent, an A2A hand-off or a workflow step passes the same control chain as a tool called in chat.

Outside agents get only what they need

An agent outside Cortx gets no user token, no history and no state, only an opaque session id. If token exchange fails, the call is refused, never downgraded.

Observe, then arm

Every orchestration control ships off and observable, with a counter you can read, so you see what it would have decided before you switch it on.

See your agents work together.

We'll walk through a maker-checker workflow and an A2A hand-off on a scenario that looks like your firm.