GroupChat Pattern ↗

Editorial Notes

GroupChat is AutoGen’s defining contribution to the orchestration landscape — it treats multi-agent coordination as a conversation management problem rather than a workflow or graph problem. A GroupChatManager controls turn-taking, and speaker selection determines which agent responds next (round-robin, random, LLM-driven based on agent descriptions, or custom). This is the most natural model for tasks that genuinely resemble team discussions, but it struggles with structured workflows where you need deterministic execution order. Compare with CrewAI’s hierarchical process (which also uses a manager agent but with task-based delegation) and Google ADK’s workflow agents (which skip the LLM entirely for control flow).