The intelligence era will not be won with more technology. It will be won by the organisations that know what deserves their attention, and design the people, the agents, and the work around it.
A field changed when eight researchers focused on what mattered. The same lesson now applies to organisations.
In June of 2017, eight researchers at Google published a paper that changed everything. They argued the field had been building the wrong machinery for years. You did not need recurrent networks. You did not need convolutions. You needed attention. The architecture they proposed was simpler than what had come before, not more complex. The thesis was that focus on the right thing was more powerful than the elaboration of the wrong things.
Eight years later, every modern AI system descends from that paper. The transformer architecture they introduced underpins every model you have heard of. The lesson, however, is not really about machine learning. It is about how progress happens in any field. Most of the time, it happens by removing complexity rather than adding it. By attending to what matters and ignoring what does not.
We are at the same moment again, this time with organisations.
The intelligence era is arriving faster than most leaders are prepared for. Every company is being asked to deploy agents into its operations, redesign its workflows, rethink the organisation itself. Almost none of them know where to begin, and in the noise, the actual question gets lost.
The actual question is not how to deploy more technology. It is how to focus an organisation on what matters, and to design the agents and the people and the work around that focus.
This is what attention means in the context of an organisation. Not the cognitive load on your inbox. Attention is the firm's collective capacity to direct its energy at the things that produce real outcomes for the people it exists to serve. Most companies spend it badly. They optimise the visible at the expense of the meaningful, and mistake activity for progress.
The agentic era will reward the organisations that can focus their attention on what matters. It will punish the ones that cannot. This is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem, an organisational design problem, a culture problem. The technology is the smaller half of the work.
We named this firm 1706 Studio because we believe the parallel is real. The paper that opened the AI era was not the most technically complex piece of research published that year. It was the simplest one with the right insight. The firms that win the next decade will not be the ones with the most technology. They will be the ones with the clearest attention.
Our work is to help leaders find that clarity, and then to prove it. We think like advisors and prove it like builders: the strategy does not arrive as a deck, it arrives as a working system, in your organisation, in days. We help leaders see, with care, what matters most in their organisation right now, and then we build around it.
We believe the human is at the centre. Always. The agents serve the work. The work serves the people. The firm exists to design the relationships between all three.
This essay will be replaced quarterly with new thinking. The deeper material, the annotated paper, the timeline of attention, the reading list, lives in the library, open to everyone. It is an invitation to think with us.
If any of it lands, you know how to find us.
Every leader is being told to transform. Almost no one is being shown how. This is how the work arrives: three stages, one team, no handoffs, and at every stage something real to look at rather than something to imagine. The thinking underneath it lives in the library.
The first instrument is already public. Agent Network, our reference guide to the agent landscape, is public. Start there and you will see how we think before you ever write to us.
Craig publishes Ground Truth, essays on the intelligence era and what we choose to do with it. The writing does in public what the studio does in private: it pays attention. Four places to start.
We ran the work on people because there was nothing else to run it on. Now there is. The essay closest to the centre of the studio's thesis.
For three centuries a company was land, labour and capital. A fourth input has arrived, and it changes what a firm is.
When intelligence becomes a commodity, what stays yours is all that is left to compete on.
The difference between using AI to do more work and building the systems that do the work instead. The offer above, as an essay.
Craig also speaks on the orchestration layer and the future of work. Invitations through the same door as everything else: hello@1706.ai.
We do not publish case studies. The work belongs to the people who commissioned it. What follows are short, anonymised notes on the kinds of questions we have been asked, and the angles we have taken on them.
A venture studio asked us to help redesign itself from the inside out, around the assumption that agents would be full participants in its operations from day one. We did not build them an AI tool. We did something more difficult and more useful: we codified the operating model of the firm into a structure that an agent could read, reason about, and act on, with humans coordinating the relationships and judgement that agents cannot. The result is a chief of staff agent that holds context across the entire firm, coordinates project teams, and removes a category of friction the partners had been carrying for years.
Operating model · Chief of staff · Friction removalA founder running several companies in parallel asked us to design what an executive-tier agent might look like for someone in their position. The technical challenge was straightforward. The harder question was philosophical: which decisions should remain entirely human, which should be agent-assisted, and which could be agent-led with human approval? The work produced a working agent and, more importantly, a written constitution for how the founder would relate to it. The relationship turned out to matter more than the technology.
Founder operations · Agent constitution · The human and agent relationshipA US organisation working to help ordinary people get real value from AI, and to defend them against its harms, asked us to build the agentic backbone they would need. The work matters because most AI infrastructure is being built for enterprises and the wealthy. Almost no one is building thoughtful tools for the people who will be most affected by the transition and least equipped to navigate it. The brief was technical. The motivation was civic. We took it because the question of who AI ends up serving is the most important question in the field.
Civic infrastructure · Defensive AI · The other 95 per centA note about the work itself rather than a specific engagement. We have been struck, across every project this season, by how little of the difficulty is technical. The hard part is almost always organisational, almost always about people, almost always about questions of authority and judgement that have been carried unexamined for years. The agentic transition is forcing companies to be honest about how they work. The companies willing to look at this clearly are finding the deployments easier than they expected. The ones still arguing about model selection are finding the deployments impossible. We are taking notes.
Methodology · Field observations · The honest workThe deeper rooms of the house are open. The transformer paper, annotated through the lens of organisations. A timeline of one hundred and thirty five years of attention. The method in full. The books we keep returning to. Take what is useful. Nothing is behind a door.
Enter the libraryThe future of work is not human against agent. It is not human replaced by agent. It is the human at the centre, augmented by a network of agents that handle the work below the threshold of judgement.
The skills that survive automation are the ones that require relationship, context, and accountability. The firm builds organisations around those skills, not against them.
The companies that win the next decade are not the ones with the largest headcount. They are the ones whose people do work agents cannot, supported by agents that do work people should not have to.
Senior advisory at the top, operational delivery underneath, with the methodology that connects them owned by the firm. No handoffs. No translation gaps. The strategy ships.
They fail because the technical work and the organisational work happen separately. The model is right, the org is wrong. We work both layers as one.
Twenty years building at the frontier of digital. Microsoft, Nokia, UEFA, Art Basel. Perplexity Fellow. Publishes Ground Truth on the orchestration layer thesis. Brings the strategy, the technical depth, and the senior advisory practice.
Operational leadership at scale across Microsoft, Nokia, and Minecraft Studios. Brings the delivery model, the financial discipline, the network of builders, and the business framing that keeps the firm focused on outcomes a leadership team can act on.