1706 Studio · Strategy, education and agent systems for organisations

Intelligence is getting cheap.
Attention isn’t.

We help organisations understand what’s changing, decide what deserves their attention, and build the agentic operations around it. With their people, not instead of them.

Run the Attention Audit Watch the film · 2 min How an agentic company works

What you’re looking at

This is how a transformer reads a sentence. Each word weighs every other word, then rebuilds its meaning from the ones it attends to. Tap any word to see how the model reads it. Organisations need the same discipline.

A film by 1706 Studio · 2 min 15 sec

The Full Stop.

In June 2017 a paper called Attention Is All You Need changed what machines can do. Two minutes on what it means for how organisations work.

Playing silently. Click for the full film with sound.

I.In the room

We teach it. Then we build it.

Leaders can’t direct what they don’t understand, so we start in the room, with football’s governing bodies, women’s sport, business schools and leadership teams. Then we stay and build: the frameworks, the agent systems and the new ways of working, until your people run them.

Teach: Keynotes · Masterclasses · Leadership sessions · Playbooks
Build: Frameworks · Agent systems · Operating models · Handover to your team

Every organisation produces more than it could ever attend to. Most of it doesn’t need a person at all.

Scroll, and watch what deserves attention

Most of it doesn’t need you. The rest needs all of you.

Agents can carry the volume. People should carry what matters. The work is deciding which is which, and then building it properly.

Why we’re called 17.06

II.The idea

Attention is all you need.

In June 2017, eight researchers at Google published the paper behind every modern AI system. Its insight was simple: a model works best when it decides what to attend to, and ignores the rest. Organisations work the same way. So we named the studio after the paper.

arXiv:1706.03762 · Vaswani et al. · 17 is the year, 06 the month

One attention head · an organisation

Query

Weekly reporting0.07
Status meetings0.07
The client relationship0.07
First drafts0.07
Hiring0.07
Reconciliations0.07
Chasing updates0.07
A hard conversation0.07
Research briefs0.07
The deck nobody reads0.07
Pricing decisions0.07
Duplicate approvals0.07
Meeting notes0.07
Saying no0.07

You’ve seen a model weigh a sentence. This is the same mechanism weighing an organisation: one question, every activity, and a fixed amount of attention to share between them. Most get almost none. Choose a question.

Illustrative weights

III.What’s changing

Everyone is about to have the same intelligence.

The models are becoming a utility. When every firm can rent the same mind, what’s left to compete on is what you choose to point it at.

From Ground Truth · Everyone Is About to Have the Same Intelligence ↗

We made work faster. We didn’t change how work works.

Most AI so far has sped up the old operating model. The same meetings, the same handoffs, the same reports. Only quicker.

From Ground Truth · We Made Work Faster ↗

Everyone is adopting AI. Almost nobody is absorbing it.

Counting how many people use the tools misses the point. The bigger prize is removing the need to use them at all.

From Ground Truth · Everyone Is Adopting AI ↗

Your next customer may not be human.

Agents are starting to sit between people and the companies they buy from. They read everything, and they only shortlist what they can verify.

From Ground Truth · When Your Customer Is No Longer Human ↗

IV.How an agentic company works

Five layers. Four threads. One company.

This is the AgentNetwork Framework, our open model of how an organisation works once people and agents share the work. Most firms start with the tools. The tools are the least of it.

Everyone rents the same intelligence. The difference is what your organisation knows, who decides, and how the work is run.

Read the framework ↗Build a company map ↗

V.The work

Proof, not decks.

We think like advisors and prove it like builders. Everything here is something you can open, watch or use today.

Open resource · Free to explore

AgentNetwork ↗

Our open resource for designing better work: the framework, a company map you can build, your AI level and practical playbooks.

Instrument · Diagnose

The Attention Audit →

Ten questions, three minutes, a reading of where your organisation’s attention goes.

Film · 3 min

A new way to work →

From operating software to directing intelligent systems, with a starter instruction to try.

Explainer · 1 min

Generation is cheap. Proof isn’t. →

What happens when agents can check claims as fast as AI can make them, and why every company needs a brain.

Playbook · Women’s sport

AI That Actually Works →

From RAISE 2026 at Emirates Stadium: the test to run on your own organisation, a thirty day plan and the economics.

Starter pack · English and Arabic

The New Colleague ↗

What every association can do next week, written to be used, not filed.

Notes from the field, told without naming names.

The work belongs to the people who commissioned it

Client · Revenio
Eye care, global
2026

Rethinking how a marketing organisation works, not just how fast it works.

A strategic approach to transforming a global marketing team: where its attention goes today, which work agents should take on, and how roles change so people spend their time on the judgement and the relationships. The details stay with the client.

Marketing operations
Operating model
How work gets done

Client
Venture studio
Spring 2026

The operating model of a venture firm, codified so an agent can read it.

We didn’t build them an AI tool. We wrote down how the firm works in a form an agent could reason about, and built a chief of staff agent on top, with people holding the relationships and the judgement.

Operating model
Chief of staff agent
Friction removed

Client
Founder, several ventures
Spring 2026

An executive agent, and a constitution for how a founder works with it.

Which decisions stay human, which are agent assisted, which are agent led with approval. The relationship turned out to matter more than the technology.

Founder operations
Agent constitution

Client
US non profit
Spring 2026

Agent infrastructure for the people most affected by AI and least equipped for it.

The brief was technical. The motivation was civic. Who AI ends up serving is the most important question in the field.

Civic infrastructure
Defensive AI

VI.What we believe

Belief 01

Your role and your tasks are not the same thing.

Agents take tasks. People keep the role: the judgement, the relationships, the accountability. Separate the two and most of the fear about AI goes with it.

Belief 02

Remove complexity before you add intelligence.

The breakthrough in 2017 came from taking machinery away. The same is true inside a business. The best agent is often the one that makes a process unnecessary.

“Playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”Johan Cruyff · on screen in Tokyo

On stage in Tokyo beside a slide quoting Johan Cruyff: playing simple football is the hardest thing there is. — AFC Conference · TokyoOctober 2026

Belief 03

Stop creating the work that doesn’t need to exist.

With infinite capability, the hardest question is what to stop doing. Most organisations have years of it.

From Ground Truth · The Work We Should Stop Creating ↗

The weekly status report
The deck nobody reads
The second approval
The meeting about the meeting
Reformatting the same numbers
The decision itself

Belief 04

No legacy is an advantage.

Smaller teams, fewer systems and tighter budgets used to be the constraint. In this shift they’re the head start. There’s less to unwind before the new way of working can begin.

Belief 05

Human first. Agent augmented. Always in that order.

Not human against agent, and not human replaced by agent. People at the centre, with agents handling the work below the threshold of judgement.

VII.How we work

Diagnose. Build. Run. The strategy ships.

i.

Diagnose

the attention audit

A short, senior engagement inside the operating reality. Where attention goes today, where it should go, and what agents should do first.

Afterwards: a map leadership can act on.

ii.

Build

working systems, in days

We prove the strategy by building it, with the people who’ll run it. Nothing arrives as a recommendation that could have arrived as a demonstration.

Afterwards: a working system inside the organisation.

iii.

Run

owned by your people

We stay while the organisation learns to run what we built together, then hand it over properly. Done with people, not to them.

Afterwards: a capability the team owns.

VIII.The people

A small team, on purpose.

Strategy and delivery in the same room. Decades of building at Microsoft, Nokia, UEFA, Art Basel and Minecraft, and a generation native to the tools.

Craig Hepburn

CEO · Founding Partner

Twenty five years at the frontier of digital: Microsoft, Nokia, UEFA, Art Basel. Perplexity Fellow. Writes Ground Truth. Brings the strategy, the technical depth and the senior advisory practice.

Fergus Lynch

COO · Founding Partner

Operational leadership across Microsoft, Nokia and Minecraft Studios. Brings the delivery model, the financial discipline and the network of builders.

Connor Hepburn

Next Gen Partner · Agent Infrastructure

Builds the agents the firm runs on. Part of the first generation of operators native to these tools.

IX.Thinking in public

Ground Truth. The thinking, in the open.

Craig’s 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.

New here · Start with the guide ↗

Every essay · The Ground Truth archive ↗

Most things don’t need more attention. The right things do.

Tell us what’s taking your organisation’s attention. You’ll get a first read straight back, and Craig or Fergus will reply to you personally.

Not ready to talk? Run the Attention Audit or map one workflow first.