How Agents Hand Off to Each Other

Module 3, Multi-Agent & Delegation | Essay 5 of 7

The quality of a multi-agent workflow depends less on how good each individual agent is and more on how well they hand off to each other.

A weak handoff is the most common failure point. The first agent produces something solid. The second agent receives a vague summary or an unexplained data dump. It doesn't know what matters, what to prioritize or what the final output needs to accomplish. The quality of the second agent's work drops, not because it's less capable, but because it was under-briefed.

A strong handoff has three parts.

What happened. A summary of what the first agent produced. Not the full output, a digest. What did it find? What are the key points? What's the most important thing the next agent should know? This is your job, not the first agent's. You're the judgment layer between stages.

What it means. Why does this matter for the next step? What implications does it have? What should the second agent weight most heavily? This is interpretation, and it's where a human's judgment adds real value to the chain.

What you need next. A specific ask. Not "write a draft", "write a 300-word executive summary of these findings for a non-technical audience who will use it to make a budget decision." Format, audience, purpose, length, all of it.

The handoff document doesn't need to be long. Two to four sentences for a simple workflow. A page for a complex one. What matters is that the second agent has everything it needs to do its job without guessing.

One useful habit: before you pass the handoff, read it back to yourself as if you were the receiving agent. Do you have what you'd need? If something's missing, add it now.

Multi-agent work only delivers its potential when each agent starts its phase fully informed. The handoff is how you make that happen.