The AI economy is consolidating into a three-layer stack where value capture follows a predictable gradient: interface dominates, intelligence competes, infrastructure commoditizes.
Each layer feeds the one above it — data powers reasoning, reasoning powers attention — but economic gravity flows upward. In this architecture, whoever owns the user relationship owns the margin.
Layer 1: Interface & Attention Capture
Role:User Relationship Owner Platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, vertical AI assistants, and workflow-native copilots.
This is where trust, habit, and loyalty are formed — the digital equivalent of the browser in Web 1.0 or the social feed in Web 2.0. Here, AI becomes the operating layer of cognition.
Core insight: The interface doesn’t just control the conversation — it controls the economics.
Layer 2: Orchestration & Reasoning
Role:Intelligence Layer Players: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Mistral, Cohere, and others competing on reasoning speed, cost, and context fidelity.
This layer provides cognition-as-a-service — the logic that interprets intent, retrieves data, and generates insight.
Core insight: Intelligence alone doesn’t capture value — orchestration and developer integration do.
Layer 3: Data & Infrastructure
Role:Commodity Plumbing Providers: Google and Bing (search APIs), large databases, data brokers, cloud infrastructure providers, and open data networks.
This is the substrate everything else depends on — search indices, crawlers, and content repositories that feed higher layers. It’s the foundation of retrieval, but no longer the frontier of value.
Mechanism of Value
Utility-based API pricing (per query or data call)
Licensing for specialized datasets or real-time feeds
Infrastructure reliability as competitive differentiator (latency, uptime, freshness)
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
