Adaptive process orchestration

Adaptive process orchestration is the name Forrester introduced in 2026 for a class of platform that orchestrates work by combining two kinds of execution — deterministic flows, where the path is modelled in advance, and AI agents, which decide their next step within limits — and holds both to a declared business objective rather than to a fixed sequence. It is a category in formation: the firm's landscape has no fixed inclusion thresholds yet, and the set of vendors is still being drawn.

The word doing the work in the name is adaptive, and it is worth reading precisely. It does not mean that the process improvises; it means that the process is defined by the outcome it must reach and the constraints it must respect, so that the engine can vary the route — assign an agent here, a person there, a fixed sub-flow elsewhere — while the objective stays fixed and every variation leaves evidence. That is a different design discipline from workflow automation, where the sequence is the specification: here the objective is the specification and the sequence is one admissible way of meeting it. When evaluating a vendor against this category, ask where the objective lives — as a formal object the engine checks, or as a paragraph in the documentation — and what an agent's intervention leaves behind for an auditor.