How do you create an octopus organisation using AI code and collaboration?

Friends,

your weekly AI briefing is here - designed to help you respond to AI, not react to the noise. No curveballs. No chaos. Just clarity.

📰 This was the week that was...

This was the week that made us focus on what the organisation of the future looks like. Code at the speed of thought arrived. Google's Antigravity with Gemini 3 now plans, writes, tests, and validates code autonomously. Anthropic slashed AI agent context by 98% - from 150,000 tokens to 2,000 - making workflows dramatically faster and cheaper.

Meanwhile, collaboration crossed a threshold. ChatGPT group chats let up to 20 people work with AI in real-time. Miro launched AI Innovation Workspace where teams work with AI directly on the canvas - no more siloed prompting, just shared context where human and silicon intelligence collaborate simultaneously. What's in it for you? When code and coordination become nearly free, the question stops being "What tools should we buy?" and becomes "What kind of organisation do we need?"

Let's get into it.

🔥 Urgent Priorities

✅ No fires to fight this week

✅ The cost of code development just dropped dramatically

✅ Time to think about organisational design, not just AI deployment

This isn't a week for panic. It's a week for reimagining what your organisation looks like when doing is cheap.

🎯 Strategic Insight

Tension: This week's conversations kept landing on one question: what organisation should we be designing? At AI Night School's morning salon, the insight was clear - this is transformation, not a project. It impacts everything. As one leader put it: "Leaders are expected to make bolder decisions, more quickly, with less data, more often against the backdrop of a more uncertain future."

Optimistic insight: When doing collapses to near zero, you don't need the same structure. The machine model that's dominated business for decades - built on standardisation, specialisation, and control - breaks down when code, coordination, and execution become abundant. As Harvard Business Review argues, the organisation of the future looks more like an octopus than a machine.

Think about how an octopus works: distributed intelligence where each tentacle acts autonomously, processing information and responding to its environment, whilst maintaining coordination with the centre. Small teams execute rapidly without centralised approval, yet maintain strategic coherence. The octopus organisation creates space for human intelligence to focus on direction, judgement, and meaning, whilst silicon intelligence handles execution.

What's shifting: The question isn't "How do we deploy AI?" but "What form emerges when execution is abundant?" If three people can now build what previously needed thirty, do you need thirty? Or three brilliant people with AI support, freed to focus on problems only humans solve - the strategic, creative, and deeply relational?

Why this matters now: Plan for AI as a productivity tool within your current structure and you'll miss the opportunity. Design your organisation for a world where code, documentation, and coordination are nearly free, and you get faster decisions, lower overhead, and space for your people to work at the highest levels of judgement. The shift from machine to octopus isn't just metaphor - it's the actual structural change AI enables.

👉 Takeaway: Gather your leadership team before Q1 2026. Work through these:

• If code cost dropped 80%, what would we do differently?

• Which decisions need committee approval that could move to autonomous teams?

• What work is execution versus judgement?

• How would we redesign if five people could deliver what currently needs fifty?

If you'd like help designing your octopus organisation, reply and we'll schedule a conversation.

🤓 Geek-Out Stories

1️⃣ Anthropic solves AI agent bloat - 98% reduction

AI agents working with multiple tools used to consume massive computing resources - 150,000+ tokens for complex tasks. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol cuts this by 98% to around 2,000 tokens by letting tools connect directly to systems without loading everything into memory.

Why it matters: AI agents just became economically viable for everyday business problems, not just flagship projects.

👉 Action: Pick one multi-step workflow requiring human coordination across systems. Ask: "Could an AI agent handle this now?"

2️⃣ Google Antigravity - autonomous coding arrives

Google's Antigravity doesn't just suggest code - it plans, writes, tests, and fixes entire software tasks autonomously. You describe what you need, AI builds it.

Why it matters: Custom software just got dramatically cheaper to build.

👉 Action: Identify one internal tool your team needs but hasn't built due to cost. Could agentic coding make it viable now?

3️⃣ ChatGPT group chats - AI joins the team

Up to 20 people can now collaborate with ChatGPT in the same conversation. The AI knows when to speak and when to listen, mediates debates, and helps teams reach decisions faster.

Why it matters: Meetings become more productive when AI participates alongside humans.

👉 Action: Try a group chat for your next team brainstorm. See if decisions happen faster.

🎨 Weekend Playground

This weekend, try ChatGPT group chats.

Gather 3-5 colleagues or friends. Create a group chat and give the group a real problem - planning an event, designing something, deciding where to eat.

Why this matters: You'll see how AI as a participant changes group dynamics. It mediates disagreements, surfaces options, keeps conversation focused. This is what collaboration looks like when silicon intelligence joins natural intelligence.

👉 Mission:

• Create a group chat with 3-5 people

• Give it a real decision (weekend plans, project brainstorm, design choice)

• Notice when ChatGPT speaks and when it stays quiet

• Ask: "What work conversations would benefit from this?"

If The AI Optimist helps you think more clearly, forward it to someone else navigating the shift. If it's not quite landing, hit reply and let me know - I read every message.

Stay strategic, stay generous.

Hugo & Ben