Your specialization is becoming a commodity. Prepare for change.
The future of roles in technology, from software developers and UX designers to tech writers and security experts, is fundamentally changing and it is not necessarily a bad thing. If your professional identity is tied strictly to a specific specialization, you need to understand how AI is rapidly transforming your expertise into a commodity.
But this isn’t necessarily bad news. In fact, it’s an invitation to evolve.
The rise and fall of the Specialist
Throughout history, complexity fueled specialization. As societies grew intricate, breaking massive objectives into smaller, targeted activities was the only efficient way to progress. These activities required expertise, which in turn created specialization. Meanwhile, technology has a habit of eventually eliminating these specialized roles to make way for new value creation.
“Innovation creates value by turning specialization into a commodity.”
Consider the printing press. Before the Gutenberg Press, the Scribe (15th Century) was a highly valued specialist. Their worth was tied to the meticulous, manual activity of copying text. The printing press commoditized this skill overnight. Value shifted instantly from the specialized activity (hand-copying) to the outcome (the spreading of ideas).
History is filled with countless other examples, such as the Switchboard Operator replaced by automated communication networks, and the Darkroom Technician making way for digital photography.
Our present chapter in history sees the rise of AI tools that are on the precipice to grant near-universal access to a high, consistent level of execution. The specialization advantage is evaporating, as any individual armed with the right tools can execute tasks like design work, legal research, or coding with delivery quality that rivals or supersedes any domain specialist.
The Pivot
If your specialization is commoditized, where will your value go?
The future is defined not by your capability to execute, but by your accountability for the outcome. Since the technical execution can be handled by AI tools, Tech roles will be pivoting from specialized activity to outcome ownership.
Look at the Designer role.
The Designer used to have the advantage of doing things that few others could. Soon, anyone with the right tools will be able to generate equally high-quality artifacts.
As the Specialist Designer role disappears, a new role will emerge, let’s call it the Experience Owner. The new value will be in the human responsible for business goals ensuring the ultimate goal of design: improving the human experience. They will be setting the strategy, defining the constraints, and validating the outputs that the AI tools will drive.
As execution becomes automated, human value is preserved and increased in strategy, definition, validation, and accountability, which are cognitive tasks currently beyond the scope of general AI tools.
Embrace the change
Your value is moving up the abstraction stack. You are transitioning from executing a specific skill to ensuring the success of a business objective.
Don’t fear the end of technical specialization; embrace it as a liberation. The end of technical specialization is not a threat to your worth. It allows your professional identity to align with the outcomes you deliver, rather than just with the artifacts you produce.
In this new reality, we are finally liberated to realize the true meaning of what our parents told us: “You can be anything you set your mind to be.”
AI killed your job. Evolve. was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.