Temporal

Temporal is a durable execution platform that provides workflow orchestration for building reliable, fault-tolerant applications — and it has become increasingly critical infrastructure for AI agent systems. When AI agents need to execute multi-step workflows that involve tool calls, API interactions, human-in-the-loop approvals, and long-running processes, Temporal ensures these workflows complete reliably even through failures, timeouts, and restarts.

The platform works by persisting workflow state at every step, so if a worker crashes mid-execution, the workflow automatically resumes from exactly where it left off. This is essential for AI agents that orchestrate complex business processes — a customer onboarding agent, for example, might need to verify identity, create accounts, send emails, and provision resources across multiple systems over hours or days.

Temporal supports workflows in Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, and .NET with strongly-typed workflow definitions. For AI agent developers, the Python and TypeScript SDKs are most popular. Workflows can include conditional logic, parallel execution, timers, signals (external events), and queries for inspecting running state — all patterns commonly needed in agent orchestration.

The platform offers both a self-hosted open-source version and Temporal Cloud, a fully managed service. Temporal Cloud uses consumption-based pricing starting at approximately $25 per million actions, with volume discounts at higher tiers. The company raised a $300M Series D at a $5B valuation in February 2026, driven specifically by demand for AI agent infrastructure. Companies like OpenAI, Replit, Snap, Stripe, and ADP run Temporal in production for mission-critical workflows. The web UI provides full visibility into running workflows, their state, and event history.