From Conversation to Orchestration: HCI Challenges and Opportunities in Interactive Multi-Agentic Systems

Abstract

Recent advances in multi-agentic systems (e.g., AutoGen, OpenAI Agents) allow users to interact with a group of specialised AI agents rather than a single general-purpose agent. Despite the promise of this new paradigm, the HCI community has yet to fully examine the opportunities, risks, and user-centred challenges it introduces. We contribute to research on multi-agentic systems by exploring their architectures and key features through a human-centred lens. While literature and use cases are still emerging, we build on existing tools and frameworks available to developers to identify a set of overarching challenges, e.g., orchestration and conflict resolution, that can guide future research..