Generative AI is giving some workers superpowers. They're using it to rapidly gain new skills outside their functional domain, gobbling up hybrid team roles as they become more capable. Traditional hierarchical organizational structures won't be able to contain these super workers. And they'll soon break out, combine with other super workers to create wildly capable, efficient, and valuable companies.
Workers today are employed to do a specific job. To fit inside a defined box and to progressively gain experience and a depth of skills within their domain. Many earned the right to do their job by obtaining advanced degrees that cost thousands of dollars and years of time.
Businesses want AI that makes these functional workers hyper productive to reduce labor cost. Delivering this is something the AI market is more than happy to do. The enterprise is everything after all. So a marketing expert can now use AI to create campaigns in minutes instead of days. And a software engineer can generate code in hours instead of days. What businesses don't want is to introduce technology that causes radical organizational transformation.
This is what the rise of super workers represents. By radically reducing the time and money needed to build cross-functional skills, super workers become hyper efficient and capable across many domains. How does an organization handle this? Maybe they spin up "special teams" to satisfy and retain super workers.
What's more likely though is as super workers realize their potential, they'll become anxious to execute on the 1,000 ideas in their heads. The boundaries of their role start to imprison them. Decision velocity frustrates them. And misaligned success metrics anger them. Until they've had enough and gravitate towards entrepreneurship and founding their own ventures.
Before they jump though, they'll peer over the cliff and see it's pretty damn far to the bottom. They don't see a safety net because it's not there today. There's no de-risked on-ramp for them to exit off onto. This is exactly the sentiment I hear from smart, curious, and highly talented tech workers who are stacking skills. They know something's happening, but they're scared to jump.
Part of the challenge is our professional networks perpetuate the employer/employee model. Just look at LinkedIn, it's largely a corporate recruiting and advertising platform. Is it the resource you'd turn to when looking to exit the traditional employment model? Probably not. It's tuned to facilitate permanent employment based on credentials and past roles, not a fluid employment model with rapidly developing worker capabilities. So too are freelancing services like Toptal and Fiverr. This leaves super workers with a decision that's far too risky for most to make.
The safety net they're looking for, I believe, will come in the form of professional collectives. Collectives will form as a new network of like-minded super workers. Its role is to get them established by replacing the economic stability an employer provides with the resiliency a valuable network of connections does. It functions to multiply individual and community capabilities through knowledge transfer and connection. And it facilitates building reputation capital, enabling team formation, and, perhaps, even matching capabilities to sourced opportunities.
I recently started Before We Go Public as a collective of engineers, designers, and technologists focused on building intelligent apps that scale human potential. This collective brings together a diverse set of super workers all passionate about using AI to build a more impactful connection between man and machine. We're doing this today by collectively building skills and deploying novel features. We're also strategizing around areas where a small team of super workers can disrupt high-value businesses like marketplaces.
Other collectives will form focused on other purposes. But what is clear is that Generative AI is not only making us more productive, but, for some, it's changing what we're capable of. And the resulting capability explosion will change the employee/employer economic model we're used to. When it's safe to jump, super workers will. And when they do, they'll seek to form connections with other super workers, that will result in an explosion of value from a remarkably small team of people.
This is all unfolding now. It's still a "if you know, you know" kind of situation. So stay tuned. Oh, and reach out. I'd love to chat.