I work on how vertical software companies become the agentic orchestration layer of their industry — the architecture, the delivery method, and the governance that lets an enterprise trust it. Currently VP B2B Commerce Solutions at Mirakl, in Paris.
What is happening to vertical SaaS
Enterprise customers are telling their vendors they can build it themselves. What used to take twelve months of roadmap — a new view, a different cut of the same data, a report — a customer's own team now assembles in an afternoon.
What a customer cannot rebuild in an afternoon is the kernel underneath the screen: the domain model, the workflow logic, and two decades of practice.
That is what an MCP server and a conversational interface are actually for. Not a feature — a change in how the product is consumed.
Most vendors are shipping both without a position on what comes next: a platform that is only callable becomes a utility.
Enterprises are not asking to build software. They are asking for more return on what they already spend — and what they will pay more for is agents that arrive already taught and stay maintained, carrying the strategies their best operators use and never write down.
VAO is a method for making the transition to agentic orchestration a deliberate rather than accidental one.
The full framework is available at /vao. Plus examples of instantiations from sample verticals.
Pillar 01 · the proposition
Who this is for, the nine problems worth solving, and what the vendor and the enterprise each get.
Pillar 02 · what runs underneath
The stack, by layer — nine layers graded by how far each has been taken.
Pillar 03 · the delivery methodology
The full adapted customer-success playbook, and how it changes the delivery model with or without forward-deployed engineers.
Pillar 04 · sovereignty and ownership
Who owns what. Changes required in existing SaaS agreements, and how to work in the right to generalisation while not training models on customer data.
Pillar 05 · partners and the moat
The five kinds of partner and what each side of the exchange gets — and why, for most customers, building it in-house does not hold up.
AMO — Agentic Manufacturing Orchestration
Examples of solution libraries in manufacturing, especially around S&OE.
ATO — Agentic Treasury Orchestration
Going beyond copilots used for Monday briefing reports, with a multi-agent roster.