By Stephen Wunker, Managing Director, New Markets Advisors
On YouTube, I don’t spend much time watching cat videos. But octopuses are a different story.
Watch one, and it can mesmerize you: an octopus, with its squishy intelligence and distributed nervous system, does extraordinary things. One arm may be camouflaging against coral. Another is finding a clam. A third is exploring a hiding place. All eight limbs can operate semi-independently, yet with astonishing coordination.
This is the ideal metaphor for how modern organizations should work. And nowhere is this model more overdue, and more transformative, than in market insights functions inside large enterprises.
While artificial intelligence has rightly captured headlines for its technical dazzle, the true challenge — and opportunity — lies in how organizations structure themselves to unlock AI’s potential. And if insights teams don’t evolve fast, they risk becoming fossilized just like all the prehistoric creatures of the sea, even while the octopus has thrived for 400 million years (it even predates the dinosaurs).
The Legacy Model Is Cracking
Market insights groups were historically gatekeepers of specialized knowledge. They conducted research, commissioned vendors, wrote up slides, and delivered recommendations to leaders. There was rigor, yes, but also latency. And often, their hard-earned insights sat unused — lost in SharePoint purgatory or buried in inboxes.
The result was slow decision cycles, bottlenecks, repetitive questions, and fragmented knowledge. And a creeping sense that the function was being bypassed by product managers, marketers, and strategists eager for faster answers — even if they were less accurate.
But AI has changed the rules of the game. The octopus has arrived.
Enter the Octopus: A Model for Distributed Intelligence
In AI and the Octopus Organization, my co-author Jonathan Brill (Futurist-in-Residence at Amazon) and I argue that AI enables a new organizational model. Like the octopus, businesses must have an anatomy that includes:
• Eight Arms: Frontline teams that can sense and act quickly and semi-independently
• Neural Necklace: Shared intelligence that connects all parts of the organization, like the way an octopus can pass information among the brains in each of its arms without even involving its central head
• Three Hearts: Operating models that flex with different needs
• RNA-Driven Resilience: The ability to adapt continuously as conditions change
Let’s apply this concept directly to insights organizations.
Eight Arms: Empowering the Front Line with AI-Augmented Insights
Traditionally, market insights were the domain of trained researchers. Today, with AI copilots and smart knowledge repositories, insights can — and must — be put in the hands of marketers, salespeople, product managers, even customer support.
Microsoft, for instance, has embedded its Viva Topics and Copilot tools directly into Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. Now, any employee can ask a natural language question and get synthesized insights across internal documents, meeting transcripts, and dashboards, with context-aware answers. One insights organization we work with created an agent that can do this – creating the tool during the course of a single afternoon.
That’s a superpower. It transforms decision latency into decision velocity. But it only works if insights teams relinquish control and become enablers, not bottlenecks. This is not about replacing expert researchers. It’s bringing their work and insights to the parts of the organization needing insights at that moment.
Stripe exemplifies this with its product teams. Using AI to surface user behavior patterns, product teams can experiment, learn, and iterate without waiting for a quarterly research cycle. AI filters noise; humans apply judgment.
Neural Necklace: Building a Connected Insights Infrastructure
The octopus coordinates through a neural necklace — a decentralized system where information flows among its eight arms, giving each one context about their situation in real-time.
For insights organizations, this means creating systems of shared intelligence: searchable repositories, AI-summarized meeting notes, and real-time data streams that can be interrogated by anyone.
Look at Travelers. Under Chief Technology and Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre, the insurance giant has embedded AI throughout its knowledge management systems. Claims professionals can instantly retrieve the right documentation and underwriters can access domain-specific insights without pinging central teams. This doesn’t just speed up workflows — it changes how people think. When insights are accessible, people ask better questions.
Similarly, Beyond Better Foods (the maker of Enlightened ice cream) uses AI to mine customer conversations and internal Slack threads. Product teams spend less time asking “Has anyone looked into this?” and more time acting on the answers.
Three Hearts: Knowing When to Embrace Each Process
An octopus has three hearts, and it can even give itself a heart attack to funnel energy to a particular heart that serves a particular purpose (like escaping from a shark). In an Octopus Organization, leaders toggle between three “hearts”:
1. Analytic – Pause and assess
2. Agile – Move fast with experiments
3. Aligned – Reinforce purpose and values
Insights leaders must do the same. Some decisions require deep rigor of course. Others need fast, good-enough pulses from social listening or AI summarizers of social listening.
Procter & Gamble has mastered this balance. Of course the organization excels in traditional, rigorous reasearch. Simultaneously, P&G uses AI to simulate synthetic consumer interviews for early insights, yet still emphasizes having real human conversations to uncover emotional Jobs to be Done — like listening to parents who feel pride in using the “right” laundry detergent. It captures data but also layers of meaning.
RNA-Driven Resilience: Adapting in Real Time
Octopuses are remarkably adaptable because they are one of few creatures that can rapidly edit their RNA. Pluck an Antarctic octopus from its cold seas and plop it into the Caribbean, and it’ll do just fine.
Organizations need to be similar, because they are no longer navigating one disruption at a time. We are in a polycrisis: AI advances, economic shocks, policy shifts. Insights teams must evolve from project-based functions into living systems of sensing and response.
Starbucks’ Deep Brew platform illustrates this. It uses AI not just to personalize offers but to predict local demand, adapt staffing, and even plan new formats. During COVID, Starbucks shifted entire store formats in response to changing consumer behavior — informed by AI, but guided by humans. Insights didn’t just report on change; they helped lead the adaptation.
Contrast that with companies where insights are slow to share, skeptical of new tools, or clinging to old metrics. These are like the prehistoric ammonites – thickly armored undersea creatures whose shells prevented adaptation (and continued survival) when a meteor struck the Earth 66 million years ago and changed the chemistry of the oceans. The unarmored octopuses? They welcomed the sudden lack of competition.
The New Roles for Insights Professionals
So, what becomes of the traditional researcher?
They certainly don’t disappear. But their role changes to include not just being a producer but also becoming a curator, architect, and coach. They help train AI models, build taxonomies, ensure rigor, and teach the organization to interpret nuance.
Think of them as the RNA editors of the enterprise — helping the organism mutate strategically.
And as AI tools become more capable, insights professionals will increasingly work on:
• Strategic foresight
• Designing intelligent research pipelines
• Coaching teams to ask better questions
• Integrating behavioral, transactional, and emotional data
Four Steps to Build Your Octopus Insights Function
Ready to evolve? Here’s a starting roadmap:
1. Map Decision Rights
Identify who in your organization needs access to what insights. Clarify what decisions can be made at the edge — and what must escalate.
2. Build the Neural Necklace
Invest in AI-powered search, tagging, summarization, and context-aware delivery. Kill the slide graveyard.
3. Redesign Roles and Incentives
Shift toward enablement. Promote people for impact on decisions.
4. Model AI Use at the Top
If leaders aren’t using AI to access insights, neither will anyone else. Set the tone — and get your hands dirty.
Closing Thoughts: From Ammonite to Octopus
Insights teams face a moment of existential opportunity. They can double down on control, rigor, and hierarchy — and risk obsolescence. Or they can embrace the messier, faster, and more fluid world of AI-augmented decision-making.
Octopuses don’t evolve slowly. They adapt in real time. Their strength is in their distributed intelligence, their agility, their ability to reconfigure.
So, ask yourself:
• Where are your arms?
• How do they think?
• And how fast can they move?
Because in the age of AI, it’s not the biggest insights team that wins. It’s the most fluid one.
Let’s swim.
About the Author
Steve Wunker has a twenty-year history as an expert on disruptive innovation in healthcare. He was the longtime head of Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen’s healthcare practice. Christensen is responsible for the terms “disruptive innovation” as well as “Jobs to be Done”, and Wunker was deeply involved in crafting his healthcare book The Innovator’s Prescription. As the Managing Director of New Markets Advisors, he has consulted for dozens of leading health systems, life science companies, and payers on topics such as new business and operating models, new therapies, and new customer experiences. He has written over 100 articles for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and others. Wunker’s five books cover a range of innovation-related topics. He is a popular speaker and has keynoted events on five continents.