API orchestration is the coordination layer that manages how multiple APIs communicate, sequence calls, and handle failures in complex workflows. In the context of AI agents, orchestration determines how an agent interacts with multiple services to complete a task.
A well-orchestrated coding workflow might involve reading a task from Jira, fetching the relevant code from GitHub, running tests in a CI environment, and posting results back to Slack. Each step requires a different API, and the orchestration layer manages the sequence, error handling, and data passing between steps.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is one approach to standardizing this orchestration for AI agents.