Philippe Ensarguet develops a strong thesis: we are living through the "kilowatt-hour moment" of the knowledge economy. Just as the light bulb ended the era of the candle, AI ends the brain-hour as a unit of economic value. He opens with a striking anecdote: a consultant delivers three weeks of work that the client replicates in four minutes with an agent, a thousand times cheaper.
For decades, the knowledge economy relied on a proxy: time was paid for (person-days, billable hours) in the hope that value would follow. This system created a systemic distortion in which slowness was rewarded. When an AI agent produces in a few minutes the code, the audit, or the report that used to justify several billable days, the very foundation of the model collapses. This is the commoditization shock of our generation, comparable to what the cloud did to infrastructure.
Ensarguet invokes the Jevons paradox: when execution cost falls to near zero, demand becomes infinite. We will not expect less work, but 1000 times more output. The signals are already there: budget lines are shifting from salaries to computing power. He proposes a new multiplicative value equation: Value = Computation Quality x Data Context x Orchestration Intelligence. If any one of the three factors is zero, total value collapses.
But execution represents only a third of project time. Agentic AI tackles the remaining two-thirds: meetings, alignment, approvals, coordination. This second wave calls the org chart itself into question. Coordination layers (project managers, middle management) face the same pressure as execution roles. The unit of work shifts from "a person assigned" to "an outcome contracted to a system".
Ensarguet identifies three emerging human roles: trajectory guardians (strategic and ethical alignment), context shepherds (sector-specific nuance, client history, regulatory subtlety that models cannot learn on their own), and trust architects (guardrails, governance of autonomous systems). Human intelligence, which incorporates values, emotions, culture, and lived experience, remains irreducible.
In conclusion, he recommends three actions: experimenting with outcome-based pricing now, tracking the salary-to-compute spending ratio as a strategic indicator, and reorganizing the company around human-agent orchestration.