being a specialist generalist in the era of artificial intelligence
2025-11-08 01:47 Note Type: Tags: ai, generalist, specialist,
Karol
Well, in your opinion, is it worth being a generalist or a specialist now in the job market and in an era when tools will become more and more popular and agents will perform tasks that employees have performed so far?
Cezary
, wow, that's a great question, and I think it's a very difficult question, and the answer probably depends on what our core competencies are, in terms of what we're good at. If we're already a specialist, it's probably worth pursuing that specialization further. If it has a future, according to various reports, it's worth delving into it, but building broader competencies. So, if I'm here now, it's probably worth building broader marketing competencies, but using the balls. It's worth learning how to create films, images, etc., and it's worth creating, for example, texts that will be supplemented with images and videos. So, if we're a specialist, it's probably worth building these general competencies, because that's what artificial intelligence actually deepens them the most. I had a conversation with a friend once, when we were actually trying to answer this question: how best to teach. We somewhat succeeded in finding that AI at this level, thinking about chatbots, offers us the greatest value beyond our domain knowledge. So, if you're an expert in podcasts, if you were to prompt a large language model, it might not tell you as much about podcasts or how to run them, because few people know it better than you, right? You have very deep domain knowledge, which isn't present in the sources the large language model learns from. But if you wanted to learn how to best describe your podcast, for example, what, let's assume, wouldn't be your turbo-specialized competency, then the language model could suggest this and bring you greater value, because it's not your domain knowledge. So, in summary, it's worth building some generalist competencies from a specialist, powered, or rather, expanded, by AI.
Karol
We return to the legendary WHY. Simon Sinek.
Cezary:
For example, exactly. Why do you want to know something? And that's a question, of course, about your motivations, what drives you. So this brings us back to this very broad exploration of the world, right? And searching for these concepts. For me, Benjamin Franklin is such an idea, such a role model of creativity. He's a man everyone knows is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, but fewer people know that he was an innovator, invented lightning bolts of protection, was a printer, and was an ambassador. And now the question is, what made him so creative? Specifically, this is so interesting: he had these meetings, he organized weekly, which he called the Junto Junto. There, he invited various artists, researchers, and scientists and regularly spoke with them, trying to understand how they viewed the world, read, and what their concepts were. Thanks to this, he had more concepts about how the world works and could think differently about things that other specialists, for example, only considered within a narrow scope. So this is the path to being a specialist generalist.