Modern AI Engineering

Lesson 11.11 · 22 min · video lesson

Multi-Agent Systems: Dividing Work Among Specialist Agents

If one AI agent is good, are five agents five times better, or five times the bill and five times the confusion?

In short: A multi-agent system is a group of LLM agents, each with its own role, context and tools, that communicate and coordinate to finish a task none of them handles as well alone. It shines when work splits into independent parts that can run in parallel or need separate expertise, but it costs more tokens, adds latency for coordination and creates new ways to fail. Start with one agent and add more only when you can name the reason.

What you will learn

  • The Big Picture
  • What is a Multi-Agent System
  • The Three Pillars
  • Common Agent Roles
  • How Agents Communicate
  • How Agents Coordinate
  • Multi-Agent vs Single Agent - The Trade-offs
  • Common Mistakes
  • When to Use a Multi-Agent System
  • Quick Summary

In this lesson

  1. The big picture
  2. What is a multi-agent system?
  3. The three pillars
  4. Common agent roles
  5. How agents communicate and coordinate
  6. Multi-agent vs single agent: the trade-offs
  7. Common mistakes
  8. When to use a multi-agent system
  9. Worked example, step by step
  10. Practice: try it yourself
  11. Quick summary

Key terms in this lesson

Multi-agent system (MAS)
Several AI agents that divide work and exchange information to reach a shared goal.
Orchestrator
The agent (or code) that plans, assigns subtasks and merges results.
Communication
How information moves between agents: messages, a hub, broadcast or shared memory.
Coordination
How the system decides who does what and when: supervisor, hierarchy, peers or voting.
Blackboard (shared memory)
A common store that all agents can read and write.
Handoff
Passing control of a task or conversation from one agent to another.

This lesson is part of the Generative AI Engineering and Complete AI Engineer tracks. See plans and pricing to open the full lesson, its video, labs and quiz, or try the free lesson first (free account needed).

← 11.10 Open Knowledge Format: Structured Agent-to-Agent Communication · 11.12 Subagents: Delegating Tasks Within an Agent Network →