Business futurist and AI keynote speaker Jonathan Brill sits down with Steve Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and co-author of their book AI and the Octopus Organization, to explore how AI is reshaping business strategy, organizational design, and the future of work.
They discuss the biggest opportunities AI creates for companies and individuals, why the real advantage comes from thinking in systems instead of replacing individual tasks, and the hard questions leaders need to ask to turn bold ideas into practical action. From collaboration and productivity to growth and execution, this conversation offers a grounded look at how organizations can become more distributed, intelligent, and adaptive.
Here’s their conversation:
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Steve Wunker: People are looking often at the future today and they have fear. But there’s also tremendous opportunity. There’s opportunity for the world to collaborate in new ways. There’s opportunities for companies to have tremendous competitive advantages, create tremendous value for customers. There’s opportunity for individuals to be hyper productive. We are living into a world of opportunity. We have to change the frame and think about what is now possible and what do we do today to make that possible happen.
Jonathan Brill: The future belongs to organizations that think like an octopus, distributed, intelligent, and endlessly adaptive. I’m business futurist and AI keynote speaker Jonathan Brill. In this series, I talk with global leaders about how technology is rewriting the rules of business. In today’s conversation, I speak with Steve Wunker, managing director of New Markets Advisors, and my co-author of the book, AI and the Octopus Organization.
Jonathan Brill: Steve, it’s been really interesting the last few months with AI and the Octopus Organization coming out. The conversations we’re having with startups, with large companies, with nation states now, trying to make sense of artificial intelligence, the innovation possibilities, how to grow their people, and how to accelerate their business growth as well. What are you seeing in terms of the challenges you might not have expected before we published the book?
I think everybody understands this is a huge moment, and they get the argument that you can’t just switch out some human task for an AI task. You have to think about the system. But what people have struggled with is how do you go from this grand vision into something that’s really executable? The book starts getting them there, but then they have to have the really difficult conversations about what is the vision, what specifically we’re going to do.
What AI should change
Jonathan Brill: AI is not a magic bullet for everything, but it is magic. And the rate at which the technology is accelerating is shifting what you can do almost on a daily basis. We’ve been asking kind of three questions. What can’t you do today because you don’t have infinite labor, infinite intellectual capacity in your organization, so you don’t even imagine it? What shouldn’t you do? What are those things that you spend your time on because of how you coordinate and govern your organizations? And then what are the things you don’t do today because they’re too expensive, too time-consuming, or too fatiguing on humans, but you would do if they cost a dollar instead of a million dollars, or took an hour instead of a year?
Steve Wunker: There is this huge fallacy out there that companies should look at how they can replace a human job with some AI bot doing that job. Really, the potential of AI is how do you link the human with AI to focus them on what’s most human about the job, make them more productive so they don’t have to do all the tedious stuff. It’s not about replacing one for the other. It’s making it better and bigger than it could before. It’s reimagining what work can be.
Jonathan Brill: It’s about how do we put people in flow more of their lives? How do we empower people to be more creative, more helpful, more impactful on their customers than ever before? It’s superpowering people. It’s finding those areas where we aren’t doing the work today because we don’t have the people, because it’s too fatiguing, because it’s too expensive, and unlocking our people to do more. When we think about organizations, the modern structure of work itself wasn’t always here. We built an entire management architecture around assumptions that AI is now starting to erase. AI will give every person in your organization better skills, better information, and access to the kind of dashboards and judgment support that used to sit only at the top.
Steve Wunker: What leaders need to do is deconstruct the work. Microsoft does this. They have work charts, not org charts. It’s no longer people in boxes. It’s the work that has to get done, and that allows them to recombine people and machines in fundamentally different ways, better, faster, cheaper, all at the same time. But you can’t just reconstruct what you have. You have to fundamentally rethink the system of work, like Henry Ford did with the assembly line. You choose your golden workflows, your five or ten priorities, and you rethink those. Then you go on to the next ten and the next ten. That’s how real transformation happens.
Why experiments matter
Jonathan Brill: At the end of the day, AI is not a technological problem. It’s a sociological problem. How do we work better together with these new tools? How do we link human labor and computational labor to create new potential? It’s about creating courage in your organization to try new things and expecting that when you experiment, you aren’t experimenting because you expect it to succeed. You’re trying to see whether or not it fails.
Steve Wunker: The great technological revolutions in the modern era were not about the technology. It was because people weren’t changing their work practices. Then, finally, when they did, the productivity gains really appeared. So it’s about the people, not about the machines.
Jonathan Brill: I completely agree with you. We keep seeing examples where AI becomes a tool for building new processes instead of just replacing people. The real shift is that your team can create something in hours that used to take a year, and they can redesign the business process as they go. If people know what they need, someone can build them exactly the tool that will superpower them.
Designing for disruption
Jonathan Brill: Geopolitics, economics, and technology are moving together in a way that makes the next five years hard to predict but impossible to ignore. Organizations are often assuming the next few years will look like a slightly different version of today. They won’t. The future is shaped by energy, demographics, decoupling, and the tools we use to imagine what’s next. The challenge is not knowing the future perfectly. The challenge is having a better way to think about the plausible futures ahead of us.
Steve Wunker: There are patterns that absolutely have applied for decades, even centuries, that we can bring into the future. We know how disruption works. We know what causes it. We know who wins. We know that great power rivalry cannot be papered over forever, and we know that unsustainable cost trends cannot extrapolate forever. The right response is not to drive a car with your nose against the windshield. You have to retain perspective and create a future that is plausible, so you can actually establish a plan for it.
Jonathan Brill: We look at the future through the rear view mirror. That balance matters: not some sci-fi fantasy, but a clear understanding of human history, climate change, demographics, and the way technologies that distribute knowledge change how organizations compete. There is a sociological basis to technological possibility, and human beings only absorb change on human timelines.
Steve Wunker: Technologies like the telegraph did far more than connect two people across distance. They enabled enterprises to exist at scale and changed how armies conducted warfare. AI will create its own predictable patterns of results. The point is not that there is a single future that is certain. The point is that there is a knowable range of futures, and that is something you can absolutely plan for.
Risk, resilience, and the casino metaphor
Jonathan Brill: This moment feels like a compression before a release. That’s why I keep coming back to atomization, componentization, and the idea that organizations need to reorganize when things break down instead of assuming the old system will keep working. The ability to lean into risk is now a competitive advantage.
Steve Wunker: Where there is risk, there is reward. A lot of people are afraid of risk because they don’t have a plan for how to deal with it. The well-prepared enterprise does. Amazon is a great example: it kept managing risk like a startup, even as it scaled into a massive enterprise. That’s a skill every organization should have in an era of continuous disruption.
Jonathan Brill: The future isn’t chance; our fate is a choice. I think about it like a casino. You can’t know any individual roll of the dice, but if you shape the rules across many games, you can create unbelievable results. In the world of AI and the growth of human potential, the question is whether you want to be the gambler or the casino.
Steve Wunker: To do that, you need to figure out what the games are, what the risks are, and how to weight them in your favor versus your rivals. Then you accumulate those advantages over time. That’s what a good competitor does. It doesn’t have to be at massive scale. You can do it at a smaller scale and still have what others call luck, but we call intelligent risk taking.
Making the future on purpose
Jonathan Brill: The thing that is scary about today is that we know more than ever, and we now have the power to shape what happens next. That means looking to history, not just our own lifetimes, but the lifetimes of humanity, to understand what people have survived, how they adapted, and how grit and invention show up over and over again.
Steve Wunker: People are looking often at the future today, and they have fear, but there’s also tremendous opportunity. There’s opportunity for the world to collaborate in new ways, for companies to create tremendous competitive advantages and tremendous value for customers, and for individuals to be hyper-productive. We are living into a world of opportunity. We have to change the frame and think about what is now possible, and what do we do today to make that possible happen.
Jonathan Brill: How do we invent our own potential? Because the reality of disruption is that the game board is being redefined. We get to choose the new rules. Are we going to let it happen to us, or are we going to happen to it?
Steve Wunker: We can live on the back foot, always trying to respond to whatever’s happening, or we can live on the front foot and make things happen. There is tremendous opportunity to shape this dynamic world through technology and through the breakdown of old orders. Let’s figure out what we want to create and make it happen.
Jonathan Brill: There’s so much more practical potential than ever. More than ever, the future isn’t chance. Our fate is a choice.
The Octopus Organization™ with Jonathan Brill is a series of conversations with global leaders, executives, and innovators about how AI and new models of leadership are rewriting the rules of business. Click here to see more episodes.
