Not everyone can—or should—pursue the I-shaped path. It rewards specific profiles and comes with real risks. Here’s who thrives and what to watch out for.
The sweet spot may be professionals with 10-15 years of experience in a specific industry or function. They have accumulated genuine expertise but are young enough to develop AI fluency. These consultants can command premium rates by combining deep pattern recognition with AI-powered delivery.
Technical Specialists
Data scientists, cybersecurity experts, cloud architects, AI engineers—these roles were already I-shaped by necessity. The technical depth required meant breadth was never an option. AI amplifies their advantage by handling adjacent tasks while they focus on what requires genuine expertise.
Domain Experts
Pricing strategists who have optimized margins for 50 companies. Supply chain specialists who have redesigned networks across multiple continents. M&A advisors who have seen every flavor of integration challenge. These specialists were always valuable, but AI makes them dramatically more productive.
The Common Thread
What unites these profiles? Years of pattern recognition that can’t be Googled or GPT’d. They have seen enough variations of their specific problem that they can spot anomalies instantly, predict failure modes accurately, and make judgment calls confidently.
This is the moat that AI—at least current AI—cannot cross. It can process information, but it cannot accumulate experience. It can recognize patterns in data, but it cannot develop the intuition that comes from living through dozens of similar situations.
The Risks of I-Shaped
The I-shaped path isn’t without dangers:
Domain Obsolescence
If your “I” is in a domain that AI masters, you’re back to zero. Some areas of expertise will prove more durable than others. The restructuring specialist navigating stakeholder politics is safer than the financial modeler building Excel templates.
The hedge: Stay close to problems that require human judgment, relationship navigation, and real-world consequence management. These are harder to automate.
Market Narrowness
Going deep means serving a smaller market. There are fewer opportunities for supply chain restructuring experts than for general strategy consultants. This creates both risk (fewer jobs) and opportunity (less competition, higher rates).
The hedge: Become the definitive expert in your niche. In a narrow market, the top performers capture disproportionate share.
AI Dependency
I-shaped without AI fluency is just old-fashioned narrow specialization. As competitors adopt AI, the un-augmented expert falls behind—not in quality of judgment but in speed and scale of delivery.
The hedge: Treat AI fluency as maintenance, not achievement. It requires continuous investment as tools evolve.
Identity Risk
For professionals trained in the T-shaped paradigm, going I-shaped can feel like admitting defeat. “I’m not well-rounded enough” becomes an uncomfortable internal narrative.
The reframe: You’re not becoming narrow; you’re becoming focused. The world has changed, and breadth is now supplied by machines. Your job is to provide what machines cannot.
Career Implications by Stage
For Those Starting Out
The traditional path—join a prestigious firm, rotate through industries and functions, develop broad exposure—may no longer be optimal. Instead, consider:
Pick a domain early: Don’t wait until you’re “senior enough” to specialize. The earlier you start going deep, the more compound growth your expertise will enjoy.
Build AI fluency immediately: This is non-negotiable. I-shaped without AI fluency is just old-fashioned narrow expertise—vulnerable and unscalable.
Choose domains with staying power: Preference domains where human judgment, relationship navigation, and tacit knowledge remain essential.
Audit your actual expertise: Where have you genuinely gone deep? Not “exposure to” but “expertise in”? This is your I-shaped foundation.
Shed the generalist guilt: The industry trained you to feel incomplete if you weren’t “well-rounded.” That programming is now a liability. Embrace narrow.
Accelerate AI adoption: Your depth is the asset; AI is the amplifier. The faster you learn to use AI tools effectively, the faster your expertise becomes scalable.
For Senior Leaders
The I-shaped shift creates new organizational challenges:
Hiring must change: Evaluating for “potential” and “general horsepower” matters less than specific expertise and AI fluency. Redesign interview processes accordingly.
Team composition shifts: Instead of pyramids with many generalists, build constellations of specialists. Each brings deep expertise; AI provides the connective tissue.
Career paths need redesign: If the middle rungs of the traditional ladder are hollowing out, what replaces them? I-shaped careers may look more like a series of deepening specializations than a climb up a hierarchy.
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.
