Glossary term
Glossary term
Architecture
Executing multiple tool calls simultaneously within a single agent step.
OpenAI GPT-4o supports parallel function calling - a travel agent calls flight_search(), hotel_search(), and weather_forecast() simultaneously, reducing latency from 3 sequential calls to 1 parallel round trip.
Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet returns multiple tool calls in one response - a data-analysis agent simultaneously queries three databases (sales, inventory, returns) in parallel, assembling the full dataset in one round trip.
LangGraph's fan-out nodes enable parallel tool execution - a market-research agent calls news_search, financial_data, and competitor_data tools in parallel, then aggregates results in a join node.