Tomato Brain

Tomato Brain is a project exploring how AI can support collective intelligence inside organisations, rather than simply speeding up broken ways of working.

It began with a question about the food system: how could companies share information to reduce waste? Working with tomato breeder Axia Seeds, we quickly ran into a familiar problem: the data that could help everyone is often the data no one wants to share.

So the project shifted focus. Instead of forcing cooperation between competitors, Tomato Brain asked what it would take to build better collective intelligence inside an organisation first. The result is a system designed to support human judgement, coordination, and decision-making, not replace it.

Tomato Brain is built as a set of connected AI agents running on a private cloud, each with a different area of expertise. In Axia’s case, that includes tomato varieties, cultivation knowledge, and sales and market experience.

The system is designed around meetings, because that is where organisational intelligence often gets lost. People arrive with partial information, key tensions stay buried, and decisions are made without a clear shared picture.

Before meetings, teams can share updates asynchronously. Tomato Brain compares, clusters, and synthesises them, surfacing patterns, blind spots, and disagreements. During meetings, people can query the system conversationally and capture decisions together with the reasoning behind them.

Its logic is simple: Parallelise → Synthesise → Decide.

Most organisations use new technology to speed up old ways of working. They digitise the mess instead of redesigning it.

That is what Tomato Brain pushes against. Instead of treating AI as a tool for automation, oversight, or management theatre, it uses it to support better collective thinking: bringing scattered knowledge together, making complexity easier to navigate, and creating better conditions for judgement.

This matters because organisational infrastructures are never neutral. Meetings, spreadsheets, inboxes, and informal conversations shape real decisions and material outcomes. In the food system, that affects what gets grown, what gets shipped, what gets wasted, and who gets left out of the picture.

Tomato Brain shows that AI does not have to make organisations faster and dumber. It can help make them more connected, reflective, and capable of thinking together.