Designing Agentic AI Systems, Part 3: Agent to Agent Interactions

Modularity in agentic systems can be enhanced by implementing a standardized request dispatching pattern, which ensures consistent communication between agents and sub-agents through uniform interfaces. This approach minimizes confusion and errors by having a predictable mechanism for dispatching requests and receiving structured responses, thus allowing agents to coordinate more effectively, even in complex scenarios where multiple requests are handled simultaneously. By treating agent handoffs as function calls with strict schemas, systems can maintain consistency in data representation, enabling reliable reasoning and reducing troubleshooting challenges. The pattern involves defining specific domain-related functions for each child agent, allowing them to focus on their respective areas such as orders or returns, while the parent agent manages task delegation and routing. This setup facilitates efficient information exchange, reduces maintenance overhead, and allows the system to escalate issues to humans or other agents when necessary. Looking forward, the integration of external data tools into these systems will be crucial, which will be explored in subsequent discussions.