When agents fail not because they are bad at their individual jobs, but because they cannot work together properly. Wrong handoff, missing shared state, duplicated work, dropped tasks. The work inside each agent is fine — the space between agents is broken.
Why it matters
Most "AI failures" in production are coordination failures. The model is fine. The orchestration is not.
Related terms
Agent Handoff
When one AI agent passes a task, a piece of context, or a decision to another agent. A good handoff includes everything the rec...
Blast Radius
How much damage spreads when something goes wrong in a multi-agent system. A small blast radius means one agent fails and the o...
Shared State
Information that multiple agents need access to, stored where one agent writes and others read. Files, databases, message buses...
Build with this on OTP
OTP encodes coordination intelligence so AI agent teams can run on it. If this term shows up in your team's playbook, it belongs in your OOS.
Found an issue with this definition? Tell us and we'll fix it.