For a surprisingly long time I had a fairly basic professional problem. I couldn't work out what the hell I was.
A CTO? A product leader? A programme director? A commercial person? A technical founder? Someone who works in open source and digital public infrastructure? Depending on which bit of my CV you read, any of those was a reasonable answer.
Which sounds lovely until you have to explain it in an interview.
Recruiters like categories, and fair enough. Companies have org charts, job descriptions and salary bands. LinkedIn gives you a helpful little box for your professional identity, on the optimistic assumption that you've settled on one.
I hadn't. And for a while, I think it worked against me.
I'd spent years moving between technology, product, commercial strategy, business development and delivery. I'd built businesses, helped scale others, worked across a lot of markets and collected a fairly eclectic set of professional scars. Then, every time I presented myself to the market, I tried to squeeze all of it into one job title.
It's a bit like owning a whole toolbox and introducing yourself as a screwdriver.
Eventually I stopped. Instead of telling people what I was, I started telling them what I could help them get done. The conversations changed. So did the work.
Nobody asked me to be a CTO
One of the businesses I've been working with recently is a young company building and scaling a consumer app.
They didn't really need a traditional CTO. They needed someone to help turn an early-stage business into something that could grow. That involves technology, obviously. It also involves product decisions, customer acquisition, marketing, brand, commercial strategy and working out which of the seventeen urgent things should actually happen first. Some days the problem is technical. Some days it's commercial. Occasionally it's discovering that the thing everyone's discussed for two weeks isn't the problem at all.
My involvement is fractional. The work is multidisciplinary. And that's the interesting part. They're not buying someone to fill a box on an org chart. They're buying judgement and the ability to deliver an outcome within a period of time. How I get there is largely my problem.
I don't think that's just my corner of the market, either. Revelio Labs, which tracks job postings at scale, found that about 24 in every 1,000 new executive postings in 2026 were for fractional roles, up from 9 five years earlier. Still small, but nearly tripled, and led by finance chiefs, of all people. When CFOs start going part-time, something has shifted.
AI has made my weaknesses considerably less inconvenient
This is the bit I've been chewing on for a while, and I haven't seen it put quite this way, so bear with me.
I've been a CTO at various points. I was never a CTO because I was the world's greatest engineer. I wasn't. My strengths were elsewhere: setting technical direction, connecting technology to the business, fundraising, building teams, scaling products and making decisions when the available information was somewhere between incomplete and mildly fictional.
I understood engineering well enough to lead it. That didn't make me the right person to write every line of code, and historically that gap mattered. You could be an excellent technical leader and still need a team to turn your thinking into a working product. You could understand growth and still need people to build the landing pages, run the campaigns and make the assets. The gaps between what you understood and what you could personally execute defined what one person could deliver.
AI is closing those gaps.
Over the past year I've rebuilt this website myself, built and shipped an open-source dataset and MCP server called The Source, and spent six months building an agent platform. Two years ago, each of those would have needed a small team and a budget I'd have had to justify to someone.
Before anyone writes in: no, that doesn't make me the best engineer in the room. And AI-generated work shouldn't be trusted blindly. I've spent enough time with agents to know they can produce something genuinely impressive and then, with exactly the same confidence, do something spectacularly stupid.
But here's my actual argument. Most of the conversation about AI and work is about speed: the same person doing the same job faster. I think the bigger change is width. If you've spent twenty years building judgement across technology, product, sales, marketing and operations, AI doesn't just make you quicker at your main job. It lets you execute across all the adjacent ones you already understand but used to hand off.
You still need to know what good looks like. You still need to understand the customer, the trade-offs and what happens when things go sideways. But you can now personally do a much larger share of the work.
That has some interesting consequences for how companies organise themselves.
The rise of the blended professional
I've started noticing more people working this way. Product people who understand commercial growth. Engineers who can sell. Marketers who can build. Former founders who can walk into a business, find the real problem and work across whichever functions it takes to fix it.
They're rarely the best specialist in any one discipline. But drop them into an ambiguous business problem with capable AI tools and they can be remarkably effective. I've started calling them blended professionals: people whose value comes from a combination of skills, and from knowing how to apply them together.
Founders have always worked like this, mostly out of necessity. When you start a business without much money, you don't get to be precious about your job description. You're the CEO, the sales team, the product manager, customer support and, on a particularly good week, the person working out why the website stopped taking payments at eleven on a Sunday night.
It's an excellent education in doing things you're not qualified to do. Some of them you get good at. Others you learn just well enough to avoid a small financial disaster.
The numbers suggest more people are trying it alone. Carta's data on US startups on its platform shows the share founded by a single person rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. Investors haven't fully caught up: solo-led companies were 30% of 2024's new startups but got under 15% of the money raised in priced rounds. But more people are starting alone. That doesn't prove AI caused the shift, or that those companies stay as one-person businesses.
Which I find personally reassuring. I've spent years trying to make my untidy CV look tidier. It may turn out the untidiness was the point.
Before the specialists start throwing things
The obvious objection: doesn't deep expertise still matter?
Absolutely. I think it may matter more.
As AI makes it easier for anyone to produce competent-looking work, knowing whether that work is any good becomes rather important. A model can write code. That doesn't mean the architecture is sensible or the security adequate. It can write a commercial strategy. That doesn't mean anyone will buy anything. It can produce a very convincing deck explaining how you're about to conquer a market that, on closer inspection, doesn't exist. We've all sat through a few of those.
There's research on exactly this. Researchers working with Harvard and BCG ran an experiment with 758 consultants, split between groups with and without GPT-4 access. On tasks inside the model's capabilities, those using AI finished about 12% more work, 25% faster and at roughly 40% higher quality. On a task just outside them, people using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to get the right answer than those working without it. The researchers called it the jagged frontier. I call it confidently wrong at scale, and it's exactly where a real specialist earns their fee.
If I've got a genuinely hard security problem, I want an excellent security specialist. Not a confident generalist with a chatbot and a newly acquired enthusiasm for encryption.
So I don't think the future belongs to specialists or to generalists. The line that matters is between people who keep developing their value and people who assume the market will keep paying for what they've always done. A specialist who gets exceptionally good at applying AI in their field could become more valuable. A blended professional with real experience across several functions could deliver what used to take a team. Neither can afford to stand still.
The person in a more difficult position is the one who's spent fifteen years in a single, narrowly defined corporate function with little exposure to anything around it. Not because that experience is worthless. Because the market may start pricing it differently.
The twenty-year veteran and the twenty-year-old
Then there's experience, which is where it gets awkward for people like me.
Experience compounds. You learn what tends to go wrong. You develop an instinct for problems that haven't announced themselves yet. You get better at telling a genuinely hard decision from a room full of people making an easy one complicated. You also acquire a healthy suspicion of any project described as "nearly finished".
AI can't hand someone that by generating a very detailed answer.
But the evidence suggests it narrows the gap faster than people like me would like. In the 2023 working paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues, a study of more than 5,000 customer support agents found that access to an AI assistant raised productivity by 14% overall, and 34% for novice and lower-skilled workers. The tools helped the newcomers most.
So a bright twenty-year-old who has grown up building with AI can now prototype products, write software, run campaigns and launch a business on very little capital. Some will be exceptional at it. And not having spent twenty years in steering committees is, frankly, not always a disadvantage.
I wrote recently that companies may stop hiring juniors altogether, and that worries me. Both things can be true at once. The individual young builder has never been more capable. The entry-level job has never looked less commercially attractive. Which is one more reason not to wait for a company to define you.
The younger builder may have less judgement and more fluency with the tools. The experienced operator may have better judgement and be slower to adapt. The really interesting people will combine both, and I don't think age decides who gets there. Curiosity has a lot more to do with it.
Where I might be wrong
I should be honest about the obvious bias here. This is a man with an untidy CV arguing that untidy CVs are the future. You'd be right to treat that with some suspicion.
There are at least three ways this could go differently. First, if AI closes everyone's gaps, the blended advantage gets competed away. When everyone can do a bit of everything, being able to do a bit of everything isn't special. I think judgement and experience still separate people, but the window may be shorter than I'd like.
Second, buyers still buy by title. Procurement teams, recruiters and applicant tracking systems were built to match boxes to boxes, and they're not being rebuilt overnight. A lot of good blended people will keep losing to a tidier CV.
Third, fractional work is getting crowded. Plenty of people discovered "fractional" at the same time, and not all of them were made redundant by their own brilliance. The market will sort that out, but it won't be painless.
None of that changes my view of where things are heading. It does change how fast, and who gets hurt along the way.
The job is changing faster than the job description
For most of modern working life, the deal has been simple. You get some skills, a company employs you for them, and you spend years getting better while collecting increasingly elaborate job titles. The employer provides the structure, the customers and some income security. You provide the expertise.
That isn't disappearing tomorrow. Companies will still need leaders, teams, specialists and people who know where the bodies are buried in the finance system.
But the skills underneath are moving quickly. The World Economic Forum's latest Future of Jobs report says employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030, with AI and big data the fastest-growing. LinkedIn's research suggests companies could widen their AI talent pool more than eightfold by hiring on skills rather than degrees or job titles. And Upwork's 2025 research found that more than one in four skilled US knowledge workers worked independently.
Meanwhile, according to that same LinkedIn report from January 2026, job moves were at a ten-year low. People are staying put while the ground shifts under them. That's the bit that worries me.
I think a growing share of professional work will be organised differently. Several experienced people engaged fractionally, instead of a permanent executive for every function. A defined outcome bought from a small, very capable group, instead of a big team assembled for a short project. Someone who has already solved the problem, instead of someone whose last three job titles match the vacancy.
That's an opportunity for people who can work independently and across disciplines. It also moves the risk onto them. Independent professionals find their own customers, manage a pipeline, price their work and occasionally stare at an uncomfortable gap between invoices. There's no HR department lining up your next assignment. And if your whole commercial strategy is hoping a recruiter remembers you exist, you're in for an interesting time.
The upside is real, though. For the first time, one person can build a fairly sophisticated professional business without most of the infrastructure that used to require. The cost of operating independently is falling, and reaching buyers directly is getting easier.
Your reputation is an asset, so you should own it
This is the part I think people are underestimating.
If companies increasingly buy outcomes rather than roles, how do they find the people who can deliver them? And how do you show value that doesn't fit in a job title?
For years, a lot of us outsourced our professional identity to our employer. A recognisable company, a respectable title, a CV, and a LinkedIn update whenever someone promoted us or we got annoyed enough to start looking. That was usually enough. I'm not sure it will be for much longer.
I'm not suggesting every finance director starts filming inspirational videos from the driver's seat of a rented Lamborghini. The internet has quite enough of those.
I mean something more practical. A clear explanation of the problems you solve. Evidence of outcomes you've delivered. Some work, projects or case studies that show how you think. Maybe a website of your own, where you control the story instead of cramming twenty years into LinkedIn's form fields. The occasional piece of writing about what you've learned, or something you've built and why it worked or didn't.
You don't need a big audience. You need the right people to understand what you're good at, and enough evidence to believe it.
And it compounds. Something you write today might introduce you to a client in six months. A side project can show a capability your employer has never asked you to use. Over time, it becomes an asset that belongs to you, not your employer.
Three things I'd be doing now
I'm not suggesting everyone resigns tomorrow, sets up a consultancy and starts calling themselves a founder. That's an efficient way to turn an interesting career theory into a domestic financial incident. But I would be preparing.
First, rethink how you describe your value. Forget the title for a moment. What problems can you solve? What outcomes have you delivered? What are you unusually good at? For some people the answer is deep specialisation. For others it's the combination they've built across roles. For many it'll take some experimenting, and that's fine. Better to work it out while you're comfortably employed than while explaining your transferable skills to a recruitment platform.
Second, find the gaps. If you're a specialist, which adjacent skills would make you more commercially useful? If you're already a blend, where are the blind spots, and what could AI now help you do that you used to hand off? If you don't know where to start, build something. Sell a product. Launch a website. Find one paying customer. You'll learn very quickly which parts of running a business you're good at, ideally before anyone hands you serious money to find out.
Third, make your value visible. A decent website, a clear proposition, some examples of your work and a few thoughtful pieces on how you approach problems is a perfectly good start. Within the obvious limits of confidentiality, share what you learn. The point isn't attention. It's credibility that doesn't vanish when you leave a company.
And start now. Not because you'll need it next month, but because reputation, skills and relationships are very hard to build in a hurry.
The market won't wait for you to feel ready
I don't know exactly what work will look like in five or seven years. Anyone who tells you they do is probably selling a course.
But I can see enough to think something fairly fundamental is shifting. AI is widening what one person can deliver. Businesses are finding ways to access expertise without employing it full-time. And people who combine experience, technical capability, commercial judgement and the ability to explain themselves are becoming very interesting indeed.
That doesn't mean every specialist is doomed, or that every experienced executive should become a software developer. And it certainly doesn't mean everyone with a ChatGPT subscription is now a fractional CTO. Please don't.
What worries me isn't that AI suddenly makes everyone redundant. It's that a lot of perfectly capable, experienced people will wake up one morning to find the market has quietly changed what it thinks they're worth, while they were busy being good at a job title.
I spent a long time trying to work out which box I belonged in. I'm rather glad I gave up.
So, back to the question in the title. If your job title disappeared tomorrow, would the market still know what to pay you for?
If the answer isn't obvious, it might be worth doing something about it.
Sources
- Revelio Labs: Fractional executive roles (September 2026)
- Carta: Solo Founders Report (December 2025)
- Dell’Acqua et al.: Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier (2023)
- Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond: Generative AI at Work (2023 working paper)
- World Economic Forum: Future of Jobs Report 2025, skills outlook
- LinkedIn: Building a Future of Work That Works (January 2026)
- Upwork: More than one in four skilled US knowledge workers work independently (2025)
