AI is doing something nobody expected: making the generalist the most valuable person in the room.

The people who couldn't stay in one lane weren't unfocused. They were early.

Hi, I’m Katie! Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory. This is a space for anyone rewriting the rules of modern work, embracing a nonlinear career, and actively designing a life of creative freedom outside the standard 9-5 ladder.

Something weird is happening with AI, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it.

Everyone assumed it would replace the generalists first. The ones who dabble. The people who know a bit about everything and a lot about nothing. You’d think the specialists — the deep experts, the decade-in-one-thing people — would be safe. And the generalists would be the ones quietly replaced, bc what AI does is scan across domains and synthesise fast, which is exactly what generalists were doing manually.

That’s what I assumed too.

I was wrong.

What I’m watching happen instead — in the work I do, in the people I know who are building things right now — is the opposite. The generalist is suddenly the most valuable person in the room. And the AI is the reason why.

AI can execute. It can write the copy, draft the code, produce the first version of almost anything. What it can’t do is know which version matters. It can’t tell you whether the tone is off for your actual audience. It can’t feel when a product solves the wrong problem elegantly. It can’t notice that the strategy and the brand and the UX are all technically fine and somehow deeply misaligned. Those things require judgment that comes from having lived in more than one domain. From having moved around enough to see how the pieces touch each other.

The specialist, in a lot of rooms I’ve been in, is incredible at making AI go deep. But the generalist is the one who knows where to point it.

I’ve been building my own work this way. The design background and the writing and the strategy work and the client conversations and the reading I do about completely unrelated things — I used to apologise for all of that. Feel vaguely scattered about it. Like I should have stayed in one lane long enough to really be someone.

Now I’m using all of it, every day.

And the AI is what made that possible. Not because it does my thinking. But because it handles enough of the execution that what’s left — the actual differentiated work — is exactly the stuff that generalists are good at.

I think about all the times I was told to niche down. To pick one thing and go deep. All the advice I got, delivered kindly, from people with clean one-sentence bios. The implication was always that being interested in everything was a failure of discipline. A professional immaturity you’d grow out of.

What if it was training?

I don’t know if we’re at a turning point or just in a weird moment that corrects itself. I don’t know if the generalist era lasts or if the specialists find a way to adapt and the advantage disappears. I’m not making predictions.

But I notice the people doing the most interesting work right now are the ones who spent years frustrated by their own range. Who couldn’t explain what they did at dinner parties. Who moved between technology and design and writing and building something on the side, and got told, gently, that they needed to commit.

That was me. For a long time.

It came full circle.

They committed. Just not to one thing.

And now, in rooms where the AI can do almost everything with the right prompt — those people know which prompt to write.

It’s a strange thing to watch. Even stranger to be inside it.

What are you making with all your mismatched parts?