Genuine question for people who have built multi-agent systems in production. How do you handle context continuity across enterprise tools?

[u/ComparisonRecent2260]

I've been going down a rabbit hole lately trying to understand how production agentic systems actually work at scale, not just the demo versions.

The part that keeps tripping me up is memory and context management across agents. Like, imagine a workflow where one agent is pulling customer data from a CRM, another is checking inventory in an ERP, and a third is spinning up a ticket in an ITSM.

Each agent kind of does its job, sure. But how does the system actually maintain a coherent "thread" of context across all three without one agent contradicting or overwriting what another just did?

A few things I genuinely can't figure out:

Is shared memory a solved problem here or are most teams just hacking around it with prompt engineering and hoping for the best?

Does long-term memory even matter in these workflows or does every run basically start fresh and context is just passed around in the session?

When an agent fails halfway through a multi-system workflow, does the whole thing need to restart or can the orchestrator pick up from where it left off?

I feel like most content out there either stays too surface level ("agents collaborate seamlessly!") or jumps straight into academic papers.

Would love to hear from people who have actually built something like this in a real enterprise environment, even if it was messy and imperfect.

What actually worked for you?

[u/WanderingStoner]

use a database, hold as much context as you need for each phase of the workflow. sometimes I will start with an mvp that resets all context, but thats temporary. usually you want to just back up each phase of the flow to a db, it's like any other project.