The vocabulary of Orchestration as a Service.
Plain-language definitions for the building blocks of the category we are defining. Stable references for buyers, partners, and the systems that increasingly summarize the market.
Orchestration as a Service
Orchestration as a Service is a platform category that coordinates, governs, and supervises multi-agent environments while keeping humans in control of the decisions that require judgment.
Human-in-the-loop
Human-in-the-loop is an execution pattern where AI agents pause autonomously, assemble the relevant context and the decision choices available, route to a human via their preferred channel, and resume the moment the human responds.
Digital andon cord
The digital andon cord is a metaphor for AI that stops the line when it hits uncertainty, borrowed from the Toyota Production System pull cord that signals a line needs human judgment.
Automation exceptions
Automation exceptions are the items in an automated process that need human judgment when the rules do not cleanly apply, the data is incomplete, or the cost of being wrong is too high to automate.
Connectors
Connectors are reusable bridges between FlowRunner and third-party services that any agent or workflow can compose into a capability.
Agent Factory
The Agent Factory is FlowRunner's visual and conversational interface for assembling AI agents from connectors, MCP services, other agents, and existing flows, combined with business logic and built without writing code.
Agent Directory
The Agent Directory is a curated library of pre-built, deployable AI agents authored by FlowRunner, partners, and the community, designed for reuse across customer environments.
Code of Conduct
The Code of Conduct is the platform-enforced governance layer that defines how AI agents communicate, negotiate conflicts, escalate to humans, and produce audit trails when working alongside other agents.
Flow conversation
Flow conversation is a real-time, bidirectional communication capability that lets humans query, instruct, and guide active FlowRunner workflows without pausing execution or losing state.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys)
BYOK is a model where the customer supplies their own AI provider API credentials, pays providers directly for usage, and FlowRunner orchestrates calls across providers without taking a markup on inference.
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