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url: /orchestration/guide.md
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> Documentation index: https://developer.civitai.com/llms.txt — every page on this site has a markdown version at its URL + `.md`.

# Introduction

The Civitai Orchestrator is an API for running AI workloads — video generation, image generation, upscaling, transcription, text-to-speech, and more — without managing the underlying infrastructure.

You submit a **workflow**: a small JSON document describing what you want done. The orchestrator:

1. Converts workflow steps into **jobs**
2. Races multiple **providers** (FAL, Google, Bytedance, Civitai workers, and others) to claim each job
3. Streams results back — blobs (images/video/audio), text, or structured output

Provider selection, capacity, retries and capability matching happen behind that single contract.

## When to use this API

* You want to generate or transform media (video, image, audio, 3D) at scale
* You want provider redundancy without writing provider-specific code
* You want job tracking, webhooks, and resumable workflows out of the box
* You already have an AIR (Civitai resource identifier) and want to run inference against it

## Next steps

* [Quick start](https://developer.civitai.com/orchestration/guide/getting-started.md) — your first request in 5 minutes
* [Recipes](https://developer.civitai.com/orchestration/recipes.md) — end-to-end examples (WAN video, Flux images, upscaling…)
* [API reference](https://developer.civitai.com/orchestration/reference.md) — every operation, schema, and response