Intelligence is becoming abundant...
Raphaëlle d'Ornano's Orchestration Economics and the question it doesn't ask
Hi all 👋
I discovered Raphaëlle d’Ornano in 2022. Already impressed by what she was building at the time. More recently, I read her Manifesto in one sitting. 269 pages, no less. “Orchestration Economics” (link here) is published openly because, she says, her competitive advantage lies not in the ideas but in what she does with them. She’s not wrong about that !
This is an extremely rigorous investment thesis on where value is captured in the agentic era, a subject I have been taking you into more and more lately. This is the direction of history.
Three laws emerge from the thesis : proximity to intent, depth of context and workflow intelligence. Whoever masters all three becomes what she calls an AGNT : the orchestrator who captures the surplus of the entire transition.
I welcomed her on Finscale this week, for the launch of her Hedge Fund.
After letting the manifesto settle, and thinking back over my recent episodes, I realise something essential is missing. Let me tell you more.
The Manifesto
Raphaëlle’s thesis starts from a factual observation: the marginal cost of cognition is collapsing. What costs 100 USD in human cognitive labour today will cost 10 in 2027, 1 in 2028. Machines are no longer tools. They have become actors : they receive goals, decompose tasks, execute autonomously.
The question she asks is that of an investor :
Where does value go?
Her answer is convincing: to those who orchestrate intelligence, not those who produce it.
Raphaëlle maps this notion of value with great rigour through the lens of a Hedge Fund. But it is not the only question, in my view.
What the manifesto does not contain is a variable for the human being who traverses this transition. Not an oversight, more an assumed perimeter. Raphaëlle says to herself at the end of our conversation: she believes companies are beginning to better integrate the human dimension. That people are asking more often how to make this work with humans in the loop.
The discontinuity nobody really names
Previous industrial revolutions mechanised our bodies. They transformed our exteriority : what we do, where we do it, with whom.
Hannah Arendt writes The Human Condition in 1958, on the wave of Sputnik and the first fears of automation. She distinguishes three fundamental human activities: labour, work and action. And she warns us : if machines were to take charge of most of what we call “labour”, labour, work, action and thought itself as we know it would no longer make sense.
She was not talking about AI, but she saw the movement.
What makes the agentic revolution qualitatively different from all previous ones - in my view - is not its speed (even if that speed is staggering), it is its object. For the first time, what is being mechanised is no longer the arm, nor the gesture : it is reasoning, cognition. What defined us as irreducibly human in our organisations.
Electricity did not touch who we were. It changed what we did. AI touches what we think. This is a discontinuity of another nature entirely and the public debate has not yet named it.
What 350 conversations have taught me
For six years, I have put executives, entrepreneurs and investots in front of a mic’. And what I observe systematically (without exception) is the gap between the face they show in public and what emerges in conversation.
On BFM TV, CNN, at conferences, in press releases: a persona. Well-constructed, coherent and entirely protected.
At the Finscale microphone : something else. A depth, a vulnerability, an authenticity that the institutional format does not permit. It is not that they lie elsewhere. It is that they protect themselves. The social mask in organisations is not a pathology, it is an adaptation. But in 2026, as AI automates precisely the tasks that justified that mask (producing fast, processing information, optimising processes), the question becomes urgent.
What do we put in its place ?
If the machine takes over repetitive cognitive work, what remains for the human is exactly what the institutional format has always compressed : singular judgment, authentic relationship, decisions anchored in irreplaceable experience.
When someone inhabits that space at the microphone, their face lights up.
….
These questions, I have been asking them for weeks. To Raphaëlle on the value captured by orchestrators. To Jorn Lambert, CPO of Mastercard, on what it means to govern critical infrastructure processing billions of transactions while the technology accelerates beneath it
And in From Within, my other podcast, on what happens inside those who are traversing this transition (in french here).
What I hear everywhere: the technical question is being asked. The human one, rarely.
In your organisations…
who is leading the AI transition? And has that person ever asked what you want your teams to become, not just what they will do?
I am looking forward to reading Imposture by Aurélie Jean which takes on the impostors of public debate in the age of algorithms. Another way of demanding rigour on subjects that deserve better than self-proclaimed prophets.