AI is widening roles before it narrows them

The popular take says AI fragments roles into narrow specialties. Evidence from three unrelated domains says the near-term move is the opposite: people are absorbing adjacent layers. Designers wire up payments while prototyping. Engineers take on context-engineering. ICs pick up the decomposition and delegation that used to be management’s job.

Here’s the reframe: compression might be the prerequisite for specialization, not its enemy. You can’t specialize into “designing for agents” until you’ve absorbed enough system knowledge to understand what agents actually need.

So organisations hiring now for narrow specialties may be early. The near-term need is compressed generalists who can absorb adjacent layers. Specialization emerges from their experience, not from the org chart.