Imagine watching an octopus hunt. One arm explores a coral crevice. Another manipulates a shell. A third starts tasting a potential meal. No permission comes from the octopus’s central brain—there’s just action and spontaneous coordination.
Now, picture your sales and marketing organization.
Can reps adapt when an IHN policy changes overnight? Can market access adjust strategy mid-cycle when new, real-world evidence emerges? Can brand marketing shift campaigns without weeks of approvals?
If the answer is no—or not fast enough—your organization is acting like a fossil in an ecosystem built for a flexible, fast-moving octopus.
You need a new operational model.
The Octopus Model: A Blueprint for Life Sciences
The traditional commercial model in pharma and medtech was built for scale, not speed. With centralized brand planning, cascading MBOs, and rigid campaign calendars, this approach worked when the biggest variable was salesforce execution. But today, success depends on reading signals fast and acting on them with nuance.
Commercial teams in life sciences are already operating in some of the most complex, high-stakes, multi-stakeholder environments on Earth. This complexity is impossible to manage with hierarchy alone. It requires a smarter structure.
The octopus model gives us four core shifts to meet these challenges:
1. Intelligence at the Edge
In octopuses, most neurons are in the arms, not the central brain. In your organization, most questions live in the arms, too. Reps ask, “Why is this IHN suddenly unresponsive?” Your field medical group wonders, “Is the message resonating with interventional cardiologists?” Market access teams want to know, “What’s behind the uptick in denials in Region 4?”
Today, these questions are usually routed back to headquarters. In an Octopus Organization, they’re resolved—at the edge by first responders in close to real time—with AI-enabled context, tools, and guardrails.
Consider that Moderna’s commercial model, built digital-first from the ground up, has already moved this way. Its teams are empowered to run tightly scoped, fast-turn tests on messaging and channel mix. They don’t ask permission to explore; they’re expected to.
Your reps may never script Python. But they do need systems that help them synthesize payer data, pull previous advisory board feedback, and test new ideas, all without waiting for a deck from your marketing team or a query routed through analysts. AI makes it possible.
2. The Neural Necklace: Seamless Coordination
The octopus doesn’t let its arms act in chaos. It keeps them connected through a “neural necklace,” a constant pulse of shared information that lets each limb know what the others are doing without needing to involve the central brain.
That’s what most life sciences organizations lack. Knowledge is fragmented. Insights live in slide decks, payer policy updates in portals, call summaries in CRMs, and safety language in emails.
Sanofi’s internal assistant “plai” is an example of how to leverage AI to create a better approach. Built to make enterprise knowledge accessible to any employee in seconds, it removes bottlenecks without compromising control. No more waiting days to find out whether a message is compliant. No more recirculating old positioning decks.
Every large commercial organization needs its own version of this: a single, searchable truth, where reps, medical science liaisons, and marketers can pull insight instantly, with sources, disclaimers, and freshness included.
When sales asks, “What’s our message for endocrinologists skeptical about GLP-1 impacts on patients with sarcopenia?” they should see the latest med-legal approved phrasing, plus the context for why it works.
3. Operating with Three Hearts
The octopus pumps blood through three hearts, which serve different purposes. Commercial leaders need similar operating hearts, each one tuned to a different kind of decision:
- The Analytic Heart governs high-risk, high-regret moves such as safety messaging, pricing decisions, and major payer engagements. These require control and sign-off from the center. Typically, life science companies are already quite good at being careful and analytical.
- The Agile Heart governs fast-turn, local experiments: a message tweak for a skeptical key opinion leader, an alternate cadence for a health system that’s gone cold, a new tactic for HCP re-engagement. These decisions can and should live at the edge with playbooks, not permission slips. This hasn’t tended to be a strength in the industry.
- The Aligned Heart ensures that reputation and brand stay intact across all actions. Just because AI can create a personalized outreach sequence doesn’t mean it should. Alignment is particularly important as AI creates great dislocation in the economy and within firms; people’s emotions need attention.
4. RNA that Rewrites in Real Time
Octopuses don’t only change through slow mutations over generations. They can rewrite their own RNA in hours to survive environmental shifts. Pluck an octopus from the Antarctic and plop it into the Caribbean, and it’ll do just fine. Your playbooks should be that flexible.
Look outside life sciences to retail for an example. Walmart’s commercial teams use real-time customer and supplier signals to adjust how they engage with their market every day. That kind of responsive operating rhythm is what life sciences needs, tempered by higher-level oversight but not paralyzed by it.
Building the Commercial Octopus
Here’s a pragmatic, phased approach to make the shift from centralized hierarchy to distributed intelligence:
Phase 1: Map Commercial Decision Lanes
- Identify the 20 to 30 recurring decisions that your field, access, and marketing teams make weekly.
- For each, assign a risk level, impact horizon, current owner, and ideal owner.
- Reassign low-risk, high-frequency decisions that can be enabled by AI to the edge, with clear escalation triggers.
This alone can significantly reduce HQ’s burden, freeing your teams to do real strategic work.
Phase 2: Build the Neural Necklace
- Launch a central commercial knowledge layer, one that’s searchable, written in plain language, and source-linked.
- Include med-legal approved messages, market access guides, recent insights, segment-specific objections, and rebuttals.
- Ensure the system explains rather than answers. What data underpins a suggestion? What is uncertain? When was the guiding information last updated?
Phase 3: Equip the Arms
- Provide self-serve tools for experiment design, HCP questions, and engagement optimization.
- Introduce authority or quotas per team for fast tests. A pilot A/B on a message variation should not require cross-functional sign-off unless it’s high-risk.
- Train sales managers and brand marketers as judgment coaches, devoting more of their time to building human capabilities and less on the information processing that AI can now largely handle.
Phase 4: Codify the Hearts
- Establish protocols for which decisions must route through the Analytic Heart.
- Create a library of Agile moves that field teams can run without escalation.
- Publish a clear, simple set of principles to follow. This is how Amazon has grown while staying entrepreneurial; its 16 core principles provide coherence.
Don’t Let AI Become a Crutch or a Risk
Let’s be clear: AI isn’t a commercial strategy—it’s a multiplier. If your processes are broken, AI will break them faster. If your culture avoids hard questions, AI will confidently give you wrong answers in half the time.
But if your people are clear on purpose, boundaries, and values, AI helps them act faster, learn more deeply, and stay focused on what matters. That’s what the Octopus Organization enables.
The Octopus in the C-Suite
Soon, you’ll be both faster and smarter.
Brand marketing will stop guessing what sales needs. Sales will stop flooding HQ with exception requests on deal pricing. Market access will move before roadblocks become cliffs. Your organization will feel less like a bureaucracy and more like a living system.
Not because you hired better people. You already had them. You just gave them the structure to think with their arms.
About the Author
STEPHEN WUNKER is Managing Director of New Markets Advisors, a global consulting firm helping ambitious innovators—including 32 of the Fortune 500—find their next wave of growth. One of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, he’s led a decade’s worth of AI initiatives, advised hundreds of organizations, and authored five bestselling books. He’s the co-author, with Jonathan Brill, of AI and the Octopus Organization: Building the Superintelligent Firm. Learn more at www.aiandtheoctopus.com.
