Capability checklist
Memory, context, decisions, the agent fleet, approvals, governance and integration, as one checklist.
Memory
- Typed, linked knowledge graph as the organization's system of record
- Persists across every session, agent and team; compounds instead of disappearing into chat logs
- Entities typed, classified, reconciled and de-duplicated across sources, aligned to standard public vocabularies
- New entities and promoted signals confirmed by a person before anything durable is written
- Meetings, calls and threads distilled into decisions, action items, topics and expertise
Context
- Context assembled per task and checked against an explicit schema before it reaches a model
- Retrieval keeps relationships between facts instead of flattening them into text chunks
- Related facts pulled across every domain in one pass
Decisions
- Proposals, options and verdicts recorded as auditable structure
- Every decision recorded, attributed and replayable
- Consequential decisions routed to a person for approval, on the record
- Every output tied to the sources and reasoning that produced it
Agent fleet
- Tasks arrive with a goal and a definition of done
- Agents claim work by capability: preferred specialists first, capable fallback
- Each lane runs inside an explicit scope: what it may touch, what it may change, which moves need a person
- A task closes on evidence that the effect landed, not on the agent's report
- Failures become tracked records with a measured cause and a fix carried to closure
- Autonomy set per lane; new behavior runs in shadow first with a decision date and a kill switch
- Brake the whole fleet or one lane; held and silent never look the same
- An unreadable signal reports unknown, never healthy
- Heartbeats from workers and services; alerts on a change of state
- Scheduled briefings say what moved, what is stuck and what is waiting on you
Approvals (the Desk)
- Phone-first: one card per decision, question and recommendation first, options side by side, evidence attached
- A card that depends on missing context or undefined terms is refused before it reaches a person
- Reply by voice; the agent that owns the work picks up the reply in the same thread
- Reversible actions run at once with a short undo window; irreversible ones need a deliberate confirmation
- Every decision recorded with who made it, when and what they chose
Governance and trust
- Coherence check on consequential actions before they execute
- Schema contracts enforced before data lands
- Complete, queryable, tamper-evident audit record
- Provenance: how knowledge entered, who created it, what it supports
- Tenant isolation by architecture; credentials cannot cross tenants
- Pre-publish gate blocks content drawing on embargoed or pre-filing material
- Grounding guards: look up before you make up; verify the effect
Integration
- MCP endpoint for AI clients and agents
- Open APIs over knowledge, context, signals and content
- Connectors for enterprise tools, data sources and conversation surfaces
- External-model counsel: a governed, redaction-checked, IP-gated second-opinion lane
- Cross-organization federation without collapsing tenant boundaries
- All connections authenticated and tenant-scoped
- Public concierge for research: MCP tool ask_octopus at https://octo.ad/mcp, or POST https://octo.ad/api/ask