AI is just a tool: why domain experts will get the leverage

A Senior Manager at a FAANG company said this to me during one of our 1:1 calls: "I used AI to make the best resume possible, but it just wasn't performing."

She'd spent weeks refining it. Every bullet point had been rewritten. Every sentence sounded polished. She'd run it through multiple AI tools, tweaked the prompts, and ended up with what she genuinely believed was the strongest resume she'd ever had.

The problem was that nobody important seemed to agree, and she wasn't getting Director-level interviews.

A few weeks after we started working together, she was preparing for her fifth interview over a call with me.

And while I managed to not go on a long lecture (because that’s something I reserve for my LinkedIn posts), it sums up how a lot of people think about AI and AI-related jobs right now.

It is just a tool.

AI is shrinking the teams that do the work

If your job involves sitting in front of a computer, there's a good chance AI is going to become part of how you do it. Engineers use it to write and review code. Product managers use it to organize research. Designers use it to explore ideas faster. Marketers use it to draft campaigns, analyze performance, and create content. Recruiters use it to screen candidates and write outreach.

What I think is changing the fastest is the size of the teams doing that work.

A few years ago, building a marketing function often meant hiring specialists for content, copywriting, SEO, design, analytics, social media, email, and operations.

Today, one experienced marketer who understands all of those areas and knows how to use AI well can produce an amount of work that used to require several people.

You can already see this happening.

Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies in the world, runs with an incredibly lean marketing team. They certainly benefit from constant media attention, but that doesn't magically run campaigns, publish content, coordinate launches, or manage everything else that comes with building a company of that scale. A surprising amount of work is simply being handled by a very small number of people.

I think that's where all of us are headed. Anthropic is just ahead because they don’t need to pay Anthropic for Claude credits ;)

Judgment is what AI can't replace

When you understand your domain deeply, you know which ideas are worth pursuing, which outputs are wrong, and which recommendations should be ignored. AI helps you execute faster, but it can't replace the judgment that comes from years of experience.

So, the future belongs to people who know their field exceptionally well and have learned how to make AI part of their workflow.

Those are the people who can comfortably do the work that used to require an entire team.

And when your organization realizes that one person can consistently deliver what three or four people delivered before, something interesting happens.

The leverage concentrates around that person.

And that's usually where careers accelerate.