Subagent
A specialized AI agent that handles one narrow piece of a larger task, under the direction of a main orchestrating agent. For example: in a research pipeline, one subagent searches the web, another reads and summarizes documents, another formats the final report. Breaking work into subagents makes each one more reliable and easier to debug than having a single agent do everything.
In practice
You're building a market research pipeline. A coordinator agent receives a company name and breaks it into sub-tasks. One subagent searches the web for recent news. Another finds LinkedIn headcount data. A third summarizes their product positioning. Each subagent does one thing well; the coordinator assembles their outputs into a full brief.
Related concepts