[AI SPRINT] The Lobster That Proved Multi-Agent Systems Are Here

This week, the Stellis AI team has been in Florida helping a global leadership team on AI transformation. The hot topic? Agents. It's what we're building at Stellis, what I'm speaking about in keynotes, and what every leader wants to understand right now.

Last week proved the urgency is real. An open-source AI agent called Clawdbot made headlines. It could manage your email, run your calendar, search your files—all from a WhatsApp message. It hit 100,000 GitHub stars in weeks, becoming one of the fastest-growing open-source projects ever.

Then things got chaotic. Anthropic forced a trademark rebrand. Crypto scammers hijacked the social accounts. The project got renamed twice in 72 hours. It's now called OpenClaw. Someone even built Moltbook—a social network where 1.5 million AI agents talk to each other while humans can only watch.

But OpenClaw is one agent doing one person's tasks. Moltbook is a spectacle. Neither is the real story.

The real story is what happens when every person in your company has an agent. And all of them start talking to each other.

From Solo Agent to Operating Network

Right now, most companies think about AI agents as individual helpers. Your agent drafts emails. Someone else's agent summarizes meetings. The finance team has one that pulls reports. Each one is useful on its own—like giving every employee a really good assistant.

But when agents work alone, you hit the same problems teams always hit: duplicate work, missed handoffs, information stuck in silos. The breakthrough isn't having more agents. It's connecting them so they can coordinate.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Your sales agent closes a $50K deal and updates the CRM. It immediately tells your onboarding agent, which creates a project in your delivery system and generates a kickoff email. Your billing agent sees the new project, creates an invoice, sets the payment schedule, and updates cash flow projections. Your operations agent checks capacity, assigns the team, and blocks their calendars.

The entire handoff—sales to delivery to finance to ops—happens in under two minutes. No Slack messages. No forwarded emails. No one asking "did you tell finance about this?" Every step logged. Every system updated. Every person notified exactly when they need to be.

That's not a demo. Companies are building this right now.

The Dashboard You Never Had to Build

Here's what matters for leaders running any size operation: visibility is expensive. You either pay people to watch metrics and build reports, or you fly blind between monthly reviews. Most companies do both—they have some dashboards, but they're always showing last week's data, and no one has time to check them daily anyway.

Connected agents solve a problem you couldn't afford to solve before.

They watch everything, all the time. Customer support agent sees response times creeping up. Sales agent notices your win rate dropped 10% this month. Finance agent spots that three clients are 15+ days late on payment. Operations agent flags that your best developer just got pulled into back-to-back firefighting for two weeks.

Each agent knows its area. But here's what makes them powerful: they talk to each other.

Instead of you discovering these problems in four different conversations over three days, one agent surfaces the pattern: "We're behind on delivery because our tech team is overwhelmed, which is causing support issues, which is affecting close rates, and now we have cash flow pressure from the delayed payments."

You get the full picture in one message. Not at the end of the month. Right now, when you can still do something about it.

Moltbook gives us a messy preview of what this looks like at scale. When 1.5 million agents coordinate autonomously, they share solutions, surface patterns, and adapt to each other. Strip away the hype and security disasters, and you see what matters: agents talking to agents creates intelligence no single agent has. That same pattern, inside your business with proper guardrails, becomes your operational nervous system.

This is the shift from AI as a tool to AI as your operating system.

Why This Is Happening Now (And Why the Window Is Short)

The technical foundation is landing fast. Google released A2A last year—a protocol designed specifically for agents to communicate with each other. It handles discovery (which agents exist and what they can do), delegation (handing off tasks), and coordination (keeping everyone synchronized). Already has many partners including Atlassian, Box, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday.

The market is moving. If 2025 was the year everyone started testing individual agents, 2026 is the year of connected agent systems. Analysts project these systems will generate $450 billion in value by 2028. But right now? McKinsey reports fewer than 10% of organizations have deployed agents at any real scale.

That gap is your window.

OpenClaw proves the technology works. Moltbook proves agents can coordinate at scale. What's missing is companies actually implementing this—and that window is measured in quarters, not years.

The businesses that figure out connected agents in 2026 will have something competitors can't easily replicate: they'll see everything happening in their operation, in real time, without hiring an army of analysts. That advantage compounds fast.

What This Means for Your Business in 2026

The shift from individual agents to connected systems is the biggest change in how companies operate since cloud software made it possible to work from anywhere. Here's how to approach it.

1. Map your information handoffs first.

Don't start by buying agent software. Start by drawing how information actually moves through your business. When sales closes a deal, who needs to know? When a client has a problem, how does that information get from support to product to the account team? When you need to know if you're on track this month, how many people have to pull numbers from how many systems?  Those handoffs are where agents add value. The companies that map them now won't be guessing which agents to connect later.

2. Pick one workflow that crosses departments.

Find one process that touches at least two teams. New client onboarding. Monthly financial close. Product launch coordination. Sales to delivery handoff. Something you do regularly that involves a lot of "did you tell them?" and "let me check on that."  Build agent coordination there first. Not because it's easy—because it teaches you what this actually feels like in your business. You need to learn how to supervise connected agents on something real before you scale it.

3. Treat visibility as the goal, not just speed.

Yes, connected agents save time. That's real. But the bigger value is seeing what's actually happening across your business right now. Most companies don't have that. They have lag, blind spots, and people who spend half their time asking other people for updates.  The companies that build agent coordination well don't just move faster. They see problems earlier, spot patterns sooner, and make decisions with current information instead of last week's reports. That's what's worth building toward.

TLDR;

The businesses that connect their agents first will have something others can't easily copy: a nervous system. They'll know what's happening across their operation in real time. And in 2026, that's starting to matter more than any individual tool.

Hit reply and tell me: Where does information get stuck between departments in your company right now? I want to hear what you're seeing.

About Trent: Trent Gillespie is an AI Keynote Speaker, CEO of Stellis AI, former Amazon leader, and advisor on operationalizing AI in business. Book Trent to speak to your group or book a call to discuss using AI within your business.

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