The Orchestration Gap: Why Process Automation Stalls in Operationally Complex Industries
For researchers and practitioners in process automation, this provides a conceptual framework to diagnose and address automation failures in complex, multi-system environments.
The paper identifies a missing abstraction—orchestration—as the reason process automation fails in operationally complex industries like logistics and healthcare, and proposes a staged automation path where architectural guarantees (e.g., constraint enforcement, explainability) depend on the sector's dominant friction source.
Agentic systems have advanced quickly on digitally native tasks, yet they have barely touched the industries where coordinated automation could matter most: logistics, healthcare operations, construction, and the many sectors whose work is spread across incompatible tools and many hands. We argue that the reason is a missing abstraction. The value in these settings does not come from a single capable model invocation; it comes from \emph{orchestration}, the runtime that coordinates multi-step workflows, enforces hard domain constraints, manages human approval, and bridges legacy systems. We develop this idea into a usable conceptual frame. We give an operational test for which workflows are orchestration-bound, a decomposition that separates how tangled a workflow is from how much of its effort is coordination and what that coordination is worth, and a feature-level account of why today's multi-agent frameworks leave a specific gap. We then advance our central claim: the right automation path is staged, and which architectural guarantee carries the most weight depends on a sector's dominant source of friction. Constraint enforcement is load-bearing under regulatory friction; explainability is load-bearing under liability friction. We close with the research program this view implies.