For all of my career, depth has been the signal. The person who had gone deepest in their domain — who had spent years becoming genuinely expert — was the most valuable person in the room. Promotions, influence, deference: all of it flowed to the specialist.
AI is changing that calculus.
Not because expertise is no longer valuable. It is. But the economics of expertise have shifted. When AI can produce a first-rate analysis, write production-quality code, synthesise a legal argument, or model a financial scenario — in minutes, at negligible cost — the bottleneck in any organisation moves. It moves from execution to direction.
The question is no longer only can you do this at depth? It is can you direct something that does it at depth, judge whether the output is right, and connect the result to everything else that matters?
Those are different skills. And they require range, not just depth.
The Bottleneck Has Moved
For decades, the constraint in knowledge work was execution. Someone had to do the analysis. Someone had to write the code. Someone had to research the market. The value of deep expertise was directly proportional to the scarcity of people who had it.
AI has changed the supply side of that equation permanently. Deep work is no longer scarce in the way it was. It is increasingly available on demand, at a quality that — for many tasks — is indistinguishable from what a specialist would produce.
This does not make specialists obsolete. The expert who can direct AI precisely, catch the errors a non-expert would miss, and know when the output is subtly wrong is still enormously valuable. But the nature of that value has shifted: it is no longer primarily about execution. It is about judgement.
And judgement — particularly the kind that connects across domains — requires range.
Not a Generalist. A Renaissance Professional.
The term generalist has always carried a slight stigma. It implies someone who knows a little about a lot, but not enough about anything to be truly useful. That is not what I mean.
The Renaissance Professional is something different. It is the person who understands enough of multiple domains to direct, judge, and connect. Not a mile wide and an inch deep — more like: deep enough in several areas to recognise quality, ask the right questions, and see the connections that specialists, by definition focused on their lane, often miss.
Leonardo da Vinci is the obvious reference, and it earns its place. The reason Renaissance polymaths thrived was not that they lacked focus. It was that their era rewarded people who could synthesise across art, science, engineering, and philosophy in ways that specialists could not. The systems problems of that era required it.
The systems problems of this era do too. The organisations building with AI are not primarily constrained by access to deep expertise. They are constrained by people who can direct AI across multiple functions simultaneously, judge the outputs against business reality, and make decisions at the intersection of technology, customer, and commercial logic.
That is a Renaissance Professional. And they are currently rare.
What This Means for How You Build Teams
If you accept this argument, it has practical implications that most organisations have not yet worked through.
Who you hire. Deep expertise in a narrow domain remains valuable — but it is no longer sufficient. The candidates worth betting on now are the ones who demonstrate range alongside depth: who have worked across functions, who are curious outside their discipline, who can explain complex things simply to people who do not share their background.
Who you develop. Most development frameworks still optimise for depth: grow in your function, deepen your specialisation, become the senior expert. The organisations getting ahead of this are investing in breadth — deliberately moving talented people across functions, building exposure to adjacent domains, creating the conditions for connected thinking that AI-augmented work requires.
Who you promote. The person who can work across interfaces — between product and engineering, between finance and operations, between customer insight and commercial strategy — is becoming structurally more valuable than the deepest expert in any single function. Promotion criteria that still reward only depth will systematically under-promote the people who will matter most.
The Education Question
There is a longer conversation underneath all of this about how we produce professionals. The education systems that created the specialist economy — deep tracks, narrow degrees, early commitment to a discipline — were designed for a world where depth was the primary value-creator.
That world is changing faster than the systems designed to serve it. The professionals who will thrive in the next decade are the ones who were either lucky enough to develop range naturally, or deliberate enough to build it themselves.
The Renaissance is not a romantic idea. It is today’s competitive advantage.
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