Everyone’s a generalist

“T-shaped” people is a term used to describe someone’s professional abilities. The vertical bar in the “T” represents the depth of their domain expertise. The horizontal bar represents the breadth of their abilities, which may cover areas well outside their core competency.

AI expands the breadth of what people can do, collapsing roles into a single person.

Scott Belsky describes how design roles are changing in a recent interview:

Creators have always defined themselves by what category they're an expert in.
I'm a graphic designer.
I'm an animator.
I'm a motion graphics artist.
And now as every social platform, where most marketing budgets are spent are multimedia, every creator is expected to work outside of their category. AI is enabling them to do that.

This isn't limited to design or creative fields. My buddy, Greg Isenberg, shared a list of tools that are widening everyone’s “T”:

The result: Everyone is becoming a generalist.

And if that's true, it's even more important to specialize and deepen expertise to create a taller "T".

But what do you think? Software’s ability to unlock new superpowers isn’t new. I’m on Twitter at @rrhoover. :)