Single agents are powerful. But the real breakthrough comes when agents collaborate — each one specialised, each one autonomous, all working together toward goals no individual agent could tackle alone. The challenge is that multi-agent architectures have been evolving fast, and developers are confronted with a growing landscape of patterns and tools.

In this session, we navigate that landscape together — from structured orchestration with Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) to the emerging Squads paradigm: a new approach to agentic development where specialised squads of agents tackle complex tasks through composable, squad-based workflows.

We will cover:

🤖 The case for multi-agent systems: when and why to go beyond a single agent
🏗️ Core MAF concepts: Agent roles, communication channels, and orchestration patterns
🔄 Coordination patterns: sequential, parallel, and event-driven agent pipelines
🧩 Squads: the new paradigm for composable, squad-based agentic development
🔒 Governance and observability: keeping multi-agent systems trustworthy and debuggable
🌍 Real-world patterns from enterprise deployments in banking, telco, and insurance
We'll walk through a live demo of a multi-agent pipeline — built first with MAF, then evolved into a squad-based workflow — handling a complex, multi-step business process entirely through agent collaboration.

You'll leave with a clear mental model for designing multi-agent systems, an understanding of where MAF and Squads each shine, and code patterns you can apply immediately.