Octonous: Making AI useful for everyday work
Octonous helps people stay in flow while work runs across connected apps. The assistant takes real actions, reads messages, updates tools, and creates items while showing every step and asking for approval before anything changes.
Most teams don’t wake up asking for “more AI.” They just want less busywork and fewer tabs open.
In practice, that usually means one thing: less juggling between apps when working on a task and less repetitive work.
You see the same pattern everywhere. Start in Slack, jump into email, copy details into Notion or Sheets, chase updates in Jira or GitHub, before you can finally make a decision or a plan. None of it is complicated. It’s just time-consuming, distracting, and frankly annoying.
When we spoke to people in Ops, customer support, admin, PMs, sales, marketing and HR teams, the ask was fairly consistent:
- Reduce context switching.
- Take care of repetitive work that spans multiple apps.
- But let me stay in flow and control.
So we started building Octonous.
What is it?
It’s a simple platform where you describe what needs to be done, and an AI assistant executes the task across your connected apps, with full visibility into what it’s doing. When it’s about to take a write action like creating an issue or sending a message, it asks for your permission, and it can’t proceed without explicit approval.
It’s not just a chat interface that makes you copy and paste between tools. It’s designed to take real actions: read emails, post to Slack, update spreadsheets, create Jira issues, and more, while keeping you in the loop.
Once you’re happy with a workflow, you can run it automatically with schedules (for example, every Monday at 9 am) or triggers (for example, whenever a new form is submitted to a spreadsheet).
Why are we building it?
LLMs have proven themselves impressively useful for coding. But for most non-technical teams, we don’t think their potential has been fulfilled yet.
Not because the tasks are hard, but because the workflows are scattered. The work lives across too many tools, and “AI help” often turns into more copying and pasting, more context switching, and more double-checking.
We started building Octonous to change that: an assistant that can help you with completing tasks across your connected apps, with clear visibility into what it’s doing while you stay in control.
What we focus on
Directly connect to your apps and data
Octonous connects to your apps directly without third-party auth providers (many automation platforms route connections through other services, adding another layer your data passes through). We also individually encrypt chat history, instructions, tool executions and their results at rest to better protect your data.
Transparent by default
You can see which actions and instructions the agent uses and what it gets back, so it’s easier to understand what is happening under the hood and tweak the workflow if necessary.
Approvals for actions that make changes
The agent requires your approval before it sends, posts, updates, or creates anything. Especially important for sensitive workflows.
Logs you can review later
Each task execution keeps a record of what happened: actions taken, tools used, and outcomes. Useful for troubleshooting and accountability.
Start in chat, then automate
Use chat to figure out and refine the workflow, then automate what is proven to work.
Clear scope and permissions
Automations run only within the apps and actions you’ve allowed. If it isn’t allowed, it can’t be used.
Optional web access
If you enable it, the agent can browse websites to gather public info or monitor pages you specify, on a schedule or in response to triggers. Useful for workflows that need up-to-date data like current weather, news, or event schedules.
Who it’s for
Octonous is for people who do real work across multiple systems such as:
- Operations teams keeping processes moving
- Product and program managers coordinating work across tools
- Customer support teams handling repetitive, high-volume tasks
- Marketing and sales teams managing campaigns, leads, and content workflows
Even if you don’t work in the areas above, but your day involves juggling between many apps and repeating similar tasks, it’s likely a good fit to try.
Beta release
We’re putting the finishing touches on Octonous and will be opening beta access in February. If you’d like to be an early user and help shape the product, sign up to get notified when we release the beta.
