Supervisor Agent: Control Pattern for Multi-Agent Teams

Supervisor Agent

A supervisor agent is a controlling agent that assigns work to other agents, reviews their outputs, and decides what happens next.

Worker agents handle individual steps; the supervisor holds the state of the overall job, routes results between workers, and can reject or redo subpar output.

It is a specific control pattern within a multi-agent system, narrower than Agent Orchestration, which refers to the broader layer that manages agents, tools, and resources across the platform.

When vendors describe agent teams, the supervisor pattern shapes reliability and observability.

A practical example

Label: example.

In a campaign launch, a supervisor assigns one agent to draft emails, another to check brand tone, and a third to schedule sends, then rejects drafts that fail the tone check and reassigns them.

What to evaluate before investing

Ask whether the supervisor logs every handoff and rejection so you can trace why an output was redone.
Test what happens when a worker agent fails repeatedly: does the supervisor escalate, retry, or stall?
Check if supervisor decisions are configurable, such as approval thresholds or which workers it may reassign.

Limitations and tradeoffs

A supervisor is a bottleneck and a single point of failure; if it misjudges quality, it can loop workers endlessly or block good output.

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