Start multi-agent designs with the supervisor pattern — wrong-pattern choice sinks 40% of pilots

Digital Applied·medium signal

2026 production data shows ~40% of multi-agent pilots fail within six months, usually because teams pick the wrong orchestration pattern or pick the right one without knowing how it breaks. Of the five canonical patterns (fan-out, pipeline, debate, supervisor, swarm), supervisor is the recommended default; mature systems compose them — fan-out research agents feeding a supervisor that quality-gates results, with a human-in-the-loop checkpoint before any external action and consensus rounds for high-stakes calls. Builder move: default to supervisor, add fan-out only where work is genuinely independent, and always gate external side-effects behind a human or consensus step.