Teams of specialists start losing to individuals with AI partnership. A single octagon-shaped professional can cover ground that previously required multiple hires.
This doesn’t mean teams become obsolete—but the composition changes. Teams become collections of octagons with complementary shapes, not collections of specialists who need coordination.
For Careers
The specialist path narrows. Deep expertise in one domain remains valuable but insufficient. The new premium is on integration capability—being the person who can see across domains, connect dots others miss, and operate fluidly in multiple contexts.
Career development shifts from depth-first to breadth-with-depth. The question isn’t “how deep can I go in one thing?” but “how many domains can I operate in effectively, and what unique intersections can I create?”
For Education
Traditional education produces T-shaped graduates: broad undergraduate exposure, deep graduate specialization.
The octagon requires different preparation:
Learning how to learn with AI partnership
Developing competence-threshold skills across multiple domains
Practicing intersection work from early in one’s career
For Value Creation
The most valuable work increasingly happens at intersections. Problems worth solving don’t respect domain boundaries. Climate change, healthcare, education, technology—all the hard problems require integration across multiple fields.
Octagon-shaped professionals are uniquely positioned for this work.
What Remains Distinctly Human
With AI handling so much, what remains distinctly human?
Domain Selection — Choosing what to pursue
Intersection Intuition — Sensing where domains connect valuably
Judgment Under Uncertainty — Making calls with incomplete information
Relationship Architecture — Building trust networks
Purpose and Meaning — Defining what matters
The Bottom Line
The T-shape served us well. The X-shape was an improvement. But we’ve crossed a threshold.
AI partnership makes the octagon possible—and the octagon makes individuals capable of organizational impact.
The super-generalist isn’t a dilettante who knows a little about many things. They’re a new category of professional who maintains genuine depth across multiple domains through strategic AI partnership, and creates unique value at the twenty-eight intersections between them.
Eight domains. Twenty-eight intersections. One human. One AI partnership.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
