The Expert Generalist

The Expert Generalist: AI’s Most Valuable (and Long-Overlooked) PlayerField Notes by Brand ShepherdEvery major technology shift creates new roles. Think back through the last few decades: the desktop computer, the internet, mobile, and social media. Each one reshuffled the deck. Some existing roles evolved. Entirely new ones appeared out of nowhere.AI is doing the same thing right now. And we’re still in the very early stages of it.But here’s what I find strange: I haven’t heard anyone put a name to the new type of person that this era is calling forward. So I’m going to do that. Why not me?The role is the Expert Generalist.What Is an Expert Generalist?An expert generalist is someone with working knowledge and above-average depth across a wide variety of topics. Not a specialist. Not someone who went deep on one thing and stopped there.You might actually know expert generalists as specialists, because they’ve typically chosen to lean into one area of expertise in order to get leverage in their career. But alongside that, they’ve got side hustles, hobbies, and interests that quietly demonstrate mastery in a whole range of other fields. They just haven’t had a context where all of it could come together.Until now.Expert generalists tend to end up in leadership or ownership positions because they genuinely understand how many different parts fit together. We’ve used different words for them across different eras. In the early days of the internet, we called them unicorns: the rare person who could both design and develop a website. Go back further, and you’ve got the Renaissance man, or the person who could manage an entire household, inside and out, with competence in every corner of it.The label changes. The person doesn’t.Why AI Changes Everything for ThemHere’s the thing about large language models: they do best when you can draw across a wide range of analogy, context, and expertise. Feed them myopic, narrow, highly specialized input, and you’ll get myopic output. But bring in someone who can approach a problem from five different angles, connect dots across disciplines, and articulate those connections clearly? The outputs get dramatically better.That’s exactly how the expert generalist thinks naturally.They don’t have to force themselves to make those connections. It’s just how they’re wired. And because AI is fundamentally a language-based tool, there’s another advantage worth noting: expert generalists have had to develop an above-average vocabulary simply because their knowledge spans so many different domains. Being articulate isn’t optional when you’re moving fluidly between that many spaces. And for large language models, that kind of linguistic fluency matters.The Neurospicy FactorI’d be leaving something important out if I didn’t mention this: expert generalists are very often neurospicy. That includes people in the neurodivergent community, such as those with ADHD, autism, OCD, ADD, and more.These are people with a particular gift for pattern recognition, an obsessive depth of interest in topics, and an ability to spot connections that neurotypical people are not wired to catch. For a long time, the workplace had no clean slot for them. They were the odd ones out, the people who were hard to categorize, impossible to keep in a box.AI gives them a home.The Downsides (Because There Are Always Downsides)Expert generalists are not easy to work with in every configuration. A few things to know:Don’t pair two of them together. Their strengths overlap instead of amplifying. If you have more than one on a team, they need to be working in different areas of the business.They thrive alongside specialists, not alongside each other. When an expert generalist can pull in deep specialists across different areas, it’s like amplifying each area of their working knowledge. That’s the configuration that works.They will leave if they get bored. This is non-negotiable. Expert generalists are self-motivated and self-sufficient by nature. If they’re slotted into a role that doesn’t use the full range of what they bring, they’ll find somewhere else to direct that energy. And if there’s no elsewhere, they’ll create one.Managers often struggle to see them clearly. The last two decades of Google-optimized, specialist-rewarded thinking have trained most organizations to view generalist depth with skepticism. That era is ending. The sooner managers catch up, the better positioned they’ll be.A Bit of Full DisclosureThe phrase "expert generalist" is one I actually coined back in 2021. I was in the dark stretch of COVID, trying to find language to describe how Brand Shepherd helps brands, and I kept bumping into this idea without quite naming it right. At the time, I thought I was describing the business. I didn’t realize I was describing myself.Everything in this episode comes from firsthand knowledge, both my own experience as an expert generalist and the experience of working alongside others like me on the Brand Shepherd team. I’ve learned the hard way, through trial and error, what it looks like to use, amplify, and grow expert generalists in a business setting.The one missing piece, for years, was AI.When AI arrived at mass scale in 2023 and really accelerated through 2024, it clicked. The expert generalist was always the right person for a context like this. We just needed the context to show up.Where Does This Leave You?If you’re reading this and thinking, yeah, that sounds like me, you’re probably an expert generalist. And you’re going to do what you do: take this, run with it, and figure out how it applies to your business or your career.If you’re a manager or employer, and you recognize someone you work with in this description, share this with them. Help them understand who they are. They’ll take it from there. They don’t need you to motivate them. They just need the name.That’s mostly what this episode was: giving a name to a role that has existed for a long time, but never quite had one.What you do with it from here is up to you.Brand Shepherd guides brands to clarity and helps them thrive. New episodes of Field Notes drop weekly. Get full access to Brand Shepherd at brandshepherd.substack.com/subscribe