The Orchestrator

How does anyone get certified? The honest answer is that the certification does not exist yet. Risk is what usually creates professions, and this risk is already here.

An orchestrator, or a small team of orchestrators, can now direct systems doing the work that used to take a thousand people working in unison. The upside of that concentration is productivity. The downside is that the same concentration applies to mistakes. My forecast is that the amount of risk now associated with orchestration is going to drive the insurance industry to require a certified profession to show up. Insurers price risk, and when the risk sits with one accountable person directing delegated systems, the insurer’s questions become the profession’s curriculum: what were you qualified to operate, who qualified you, and what evidence shows you knew what you were doing.

The profession will need something like a bar exam. There may be industry-specific specializations on top of it, because orchestrating a medical logistics system and orchestrating a trading system demand different domain knowledge. A level of standardization is going to emerge over time. What this book is trying to do is outline whether there needs to be a process, and the residency in this chapter is the proposal: the supervised, real-work path that medicine built.

Some of the pieces already exist, in adjacent forms. ISO/IEC 42001, published in December 2023, is the first certifiable international standard for AI management systems — organizations can be certified against it today, with three-year certificates and annual surveillance audits, which means the organizational layer of this stack already exists.¹² The European Union’s AI Act goes further for high-risk systems, requiring conformity assessment before certain systems reach the market. Neither of those certifies a person. The individual credential — the orchestrator’s board exam — is the piece that has not been built yet.