---
title: "What OCTOPUS is"
description: "A harness around the models you already use: a memory the company owns, a record of every decision, people for the calls only people make, and agents that work inside bounds."
url: "https://docs.octo.ad/start/what-octopus-is/"
id: "start/what-octopus-is"
type: "concept"
audience: "operator"
dateModified: "2026-11-06"
keywords: ["harness", "context graph", "enterprise AI"]
---

# What OCTOPUS is

> A harness around the models you already use: a memory the company owns, a record of every decision, people for the calls only people make, and agents that work inside bounds.

## In one sentence

OCTOPUS by ARAMAI is the harness for enterprise AI: context graphs that remember, traceable decisions and agent fleet management under a governance plane, inside your own tenant. It runs frontier language models over a typed, linked knowledge graph, so the work they do is grounded, recorded and bounded.

## Why a model needs a harness

An AI harness is everything around a model that makes it dependable at work: a memory that keeps what the organization knows, the right context checked before each task, a record of every decision, and bounds on what agents may do. The model is the engine. OCTOPUS is the harness. A model on its own forgets last week, cannot explain why it acted and runs without guardrails.

## You keep your model

Yes. OCTOPUS does not replace the model. Frontier language models still do the reasoning: they plan, draft and deliberate. OCTOPUS sits between your data and those models. Knowledge lives in your tenant as a typed graph, context is validated before any model sees it, and decisions are recorded independently of the model that helped make them.

## The parts, one line each

- [Memory the company owns](/why/memory-the-company-owns/): what the organization knows, kept as linked facts that persist.
- [The decision record](/decision-record/): every decision, who made it and on what grounds, readable later.
- [The decision ladder](/decision-ladder/): which decisions an agreed rule answers, and which go to a person.
- [The Desk](/desk/): where a person makes the decisions and approvals that belong to a person.
- [Agents at work](/agents/): tasks with a definition of done, closed on evidence, inside bounds you set.
- [A copy for every team](/team-copy/): a separate copy that holds only one team's material. What stays separate, stated as outcomes: [What stays separate between teams](/team-copy/what-stays-separate/).

## Who it is for

Enterprises adopting AI that need to hold it accountable: regulated industries, teams putting AI in front of customers, and anyone who must explain an AI decision to a board or an auditor. In practice that is the platform owner or operator who runs more than one agent, needs one shared memory, and wants decisions on the record.