Multi-Agent Patterns with Azure AI Foundry: Orchestration, Handoff, and Shared State

[steve-kaschimer]

Scheduled: 2026-07-24

Pitch: Single agents hit a ceiling quickly - real agentic applications route tasks across specialized agents, and Azure AI Foundry provides the primitives to do this without building your own orchestration layer.

Angle: Covers the three core multi-agent patterns (sequential pipeline, parallel fan-out, hierarchical orchestrator/sub-agent) with concrete Foundry implementations. Discusses shared memory and state management across agents, error handling when a sub-agent fails, and observability - how to trace a user request through a chain of agents.

Tags: azure-ai-foundry, ai-agents, agentic-development, multi-agent, azure

Status: idea

[github-actions]

📋 Assigned to Trenton (Content Engineer)

Issue: #120 - Multi-Agent Patterns with Azure AI Foundry: Orchestration, Handoff, and Shared State

Trenton will pick this up in the next Copilot session.

For Copilot coding agent: If enabled, this issue will be worked automatically.
Otherwise, start a Copilot session and say:
Trenton, work on issue #120

[steve-kaschimer]

Published draft: src/posts/2026-07-24-multi-agent-patterns-azure-ai-foundry-orchestration-handoff-shared-state.md

Covers all three multi-agent patterns (sequential pipeline, parallel fan-out, hierarchical orchestrator/sub-agent) with complete Python implementations using azure-ai-projects and azure-ai-agents. Also includes shared state strategies, structured error handling with retry/backoff, and OpenTelemetry-based observability across the agent chain.

Status updated to draft in editorial-plan.md.