- Preface
- A Note on Our Perspective
- Who This Book Is For
- Introduction
- Enter AI Agents
- The Enterprise Adoption Gap
- Every Business Process Is Now Legacy
- Where Are You Today?
- What This Book Addresses
- From Agents to Agentic Orchestration
- What's NOT an Agent (But Often Gets Called One)
- What Is an Agent, Really?
- Agent Characteristics That Matter for Architecture
- Why Most Agents Aren't Enterprise-Ready
- Holistic Customer and Employee Experiences
- The Hybrid Enterprise: Mixing Deterministic and Dynamic Behavior
- Disconnected Agents and Agent Sprawl
- Agentic BPMN - Orchestrating Autonomy on a Solid Foundation
- The Power of BPMN
- Why BPMN Is Perfect for Agentic Systems
- One Standard, Two Orchestration Patterns: Outer and Inner
- Multi-Agent Coordination: Through Orchestration, Not Conversation
- Agentic BPMN in Action
- What You Actually Get
- Trust by Design: Calibrating Authority to Risk
- Risk Isn't Static Within a Process
- Progressive Commitments
- Cost-Proportionate Governance
- Setting Expectations Is Part of Governance
- Where Authority Changes Hands
- Reasons a Regulator Will Accept
- Agents at Build Time: Discovery, Design, and Implementation
- Build Time vs. Run Time Agents
- The Process Lifecycle as an Agentic Opportunity
- What We Can Learn from Software Engineering Agents
- Skills: Shaping Agents for Process Work
- Operating Agents with Confidence
- Pillar 1: Testing
- Pillar 2: Analytics
- Pillar 3: Instance Operations
- Pillar 4: Evolution
- Agentic Orchestration in Practice: A Camunda Example
- The Agentic Orchestration Platform: Scaling Beyond a Handful of Processes
- The Platform Imperative
- Platform Thinking: Shared Foundation, Distributed Autonomy
- The Architectural Layers
- Agent Identity and Authorization
- From Chaos to Coordination
- Anchoring Agentic Orchestration in Your Organization
- Team Topologies and Platform Thinking
- Business Capabilities and Domain-Driven Design
- Bottom-Up Innovation and Top-Down Guardrails
- The Self-Improving Enterprise: Where Agentic Orchestration Is Headed
- From Hand-Crafted to Self-Improving
- From Optimization to Reimagination
- The Compounding Foundation
- A Concrete Example: Camunda ProcessOS
- Examples from the Field: Agentic Orchestration in Production
- VodafoneThree - Designing for Trust
- NORD/LB - Earning Autonomy
- A Global Investment Bank - High-Stakes Validation
- Goldman Sachs - Platform Thinking
- Finnova - Redesigning the Shape, Not Just the Steps
- Key Takeaways
- The Essentials
- Your First Steps: A Focused Path
Agentic Orchestration
How Process Discipline Governs and Scales AI Agents in Enterprise Operations
This book is 75% completeLast updated on 2026-07-30
Building an impressive AI agent demo is easy. Running one in production—reliably, at scale, with governance—is where most enterprises get stuck. Agentic Orchestration shows how BPMN-based process orchestration governs AI agents at scale, drawing on real deployments across banking, telecom, and healthcare. Reasoning without orchestration is expensive chaos. This book shows the way out.
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About
About the Book
Building an impressive AI agent demo is easy. Running one in production—reliably, at scale, with governance—is where most enterprises get stuck.
Most enterprises are discovering this the hard way. Early pilots look promising. Then agents start making inconsistent decisions about the same customer, the same order, the same data—each confidently optimizing their narrow slice while nobody owns the bigger picture. Governance questions nobody can answer start piling up. Innovation slows as teams become afraid to touch anything. The result is manual reconciliation work that quietly devours the efficiency gains. This is one flavor of the Agentic Value Trap, and it's avoidable.
Drawing on production deployments across banking, telecommunications, healthcare, and beyond, this book gives you the architecture, the trust framework, and the organizational patterns to move agents from pilot to production—reliably, at scale, and with governance that doesn't kill innovation.
Reasoning without orchestration is expensive chaos at best. This book shows you the way out.
For architects, engineers, and technology leaders navigating the move from agent pilots to enterprise production.
Author
About the Author
Bernd Rücker
Bernd Ruecker is a software engineer at heart and co-founder and Chief Technologist at Camunda, an open-source process orchestration platform he started in 2008. Over more than 15 years, he has implemented large-scale automation systems in enterprise environments—including at T-Mobile, Lufthansa, ING, and Atlassian—helping teams adopt automation paradigms that fit modern, distributed architectures.
He is the author of Practical Process Automation (O'Reilly) and co-author of Enterprise Process Orchestration (Wiley) and Real-Life BPMN. He holds an MSc in software technology from HFT Stuttgart, is an active open-source contributor, and speaks regularly at conferences worldwide on orchestration, event-driven architectures, and agentic automation in distributed systems.
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Table of Contents
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