I joined Solenne Niedercorn-Desouches on the Finscale podcast to discuss:

--> How agentic AI is fundamentally rewriting business models, competitive moats, and investment frameworks.

--> Why orchestration rather than the models will be the true moat in AI.

--> Why traditional SaaS defensibility is collapsing in the “SaaSpocalypse,” and how investors need to rethink company value through the lens of architectural resilience.

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Quoted:

The flurry of moves are signs that private fund managers understand how AI presents a fundamental reconfiguration of the way companies do business and deliver value, said Raphaëlle d’Ornano, founder and managing partner at D’Ornano + Co., a private markets advisory and strategic consulting firm. Every company is becoming an “agentic enterprise,” and will require an “orchestration” process to allow it to unlock a new layer of value provided by the abundance of artificial intelligence tools, she argued in a recent newsletter post.

Private equity firms are “amongst the biggest employers in the United States... so it is absolutely imperative that every single company within private equity portfolios, small and big, transform themselves into this new reality,” she said in an interview.

The way to do that is to develop agents that are effectively grounded in the right business and enterprise context, D’Ornano added.

“Today, there is a missing layer for all this to happen,” she said. “Th…

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Speaker on AI, business model resilience, and the economics of the Agentic Era

Raphaëlle d’Ornano is the founder of Decoding Discontinuity and the architect of analytical frameworks, including Durable Growth Moat and ARAF, the Architectural Resilience Assessment Framework. Her work helps investors, executives, and leadership teams understand AI not as another wave of disruption, but as a structural discontinuity that rewrites how value is created, defended, and captured.

Her research focuses on what happens when the marginal cost of cognition collapses, software shifts from tool to actor, and competitive advantage migrates from static moats to orchestration, workflow control, and operational context. She brings a rare combination of market lens, strategic clarity, and practical business relevance to conversations that are often either too technical or too abstract.

Raphaëlle speaks to audiences who need to understand not just what AI can do, but what it changes in the underlying economic…

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Quoted:

Concerns that IT buyers would switch to AI and spend less on enterprise software subscriptions have weighed on the shares of Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe Systems. Those companies’ shares are all down at least 30% since the start of last year, and the decline accelerated this month after the introduction of Anthropic’s latest product, Claude Cowork.

Such stock declines underscore the threat AI poses to enterprise software firms, including ones owned by PE firms, said Raphaëlle D’Ornano, a financial consultant for venture capital and PE firms.

“There’s going to be a massive wake-up call in enterprise software in private equity, because the problem is not just on the public markets,” she said.

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I had the honor of giving the keynote yesterday on "The Agentic AI Revolution" at the ChapsVision AI Summit 2025.

In my presentation, I discussed “Orchestration Economics”: the new laws of value in the Agentic Era and how to build durable growth moats. This is the core of my view on economic discontinuity in the Agentic Era.

It was inspiring to hear how ChapsVision clients are already using these tools to generate impressive value. ChapsVision is well-positioned to be a leading orchestration platform as this economy unfolds.

Quoted:

But a cottage industry of financial analysts and strategists that sell their research to hedge funds and VC firms, as well as publishing online via subscription sites like Substack, fills some of the void.

One of them is Raphaëlle D’Ornano, an independent analyst and artificial intelligence strategist who wrote reports earlier this month raising some red flags about CoreWeave and fintech Klarna, which has also filed to go public.

She is trying to add a dose of sober financial analysis to the hyped-up world of AI, without pouring much cold water on the technology itself. “You need to have hedge fund rigor and analysis applied to a fast-moving market,” she said.

She doesn’t think CoreWeave is a “doomed asset” but has concerns about whether the chips it buys from Nvidia will continue to generate revenue as long as it thinks. That would be a recipe for disaster given how much debt the startup has to raise.

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