When Everyone Is an Expert
I’ve been watching titles inflate for a long time. Long enough that the buzzwords have come back around wearing new clothes. I started my technology career in 1991 and focused on building my skills and experience, moving from a technical writer to a business analyst and then into technical project management…and didn’t focus too much on the titles people were assigning to themselves. By the mid to late 1990s, the magic phrase was “desktop publishing.” If you could use PageMaker or QuarkXPress without breaking a sweat, you were suddenly an expert (I considered myself a PageMaker aficionado). The work mattered, but the label mattered more. Titles grew bigger than the skills behind them, and nobody seemed to mind.
Back then, the shift was real. Computers were moving from the back office to every desk. Documents looked better. Teams could move faster. Still, it was obvious who actually understood how work flowed and who had simply learned which buttons to click. That gap between doing the work and naming the work never really closed.
When LinkedIn launched in 2003, I remember scrolling through early profiles with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. I had sold my own startup before the internet bubble had burst, and was very much plugged in to the startup culture of the San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley during that time…and witnessed first-hand all of the title inflation. One in particular stuck with me. Someone proudly described themselves as an expert in desktop publishing. I remember thinking, wow, that phrase is still alive? By then it already felt like calling yourself a fax machine specialist. The skill had either blended into broader work or been replaced by something else, but the title lingered like a ghost.
About ten years ago, everything shifted again and this time it was the cloud. Suddenly, everyone was a cloud expert. Servers moved out of closets and into data centers, and that was a meaningful change. But the same pattern returned. Some people understood architecture, security, and tradeoffs. Others learned enough vocabulary to sound fluent and let the title do the rest. The word expert became cheaper every year.
Now we are deep into the era of the “AI expert.” I see it everywhere. AI strategist. AI architect. AI thought-leader. The pace feels faster this time, and the temptation to inflate is stronger. Tools can now generate resumes, bios, and job descriptions that sound impressive with very little grounding. It is easy to claim mastery when the language itself is doing most of the work.
I still describe myself as a collaboration and productivity expert. That hasn’t changed much over the decades. The tools have evolved, and AI is clearly part of the picture now, but the core question is the same: How do people actually get work done together? Technology supports that, but it does not replace judgment, context, or experience.
So when I see titles like AI Architect or AI Strategist, I pause. What does that really mean? If someone has a degree in the underlying technology, understands models, data, and systems at a deep level, that is one thing. That kind of expertise is earned. But if the title comes mostly from an auto-generated resume and a handful of prompts, we should be careful.
Titles are easy to claim. Real understanding takes time. I have learned to look past the labels and listen for how people talk about their work. It’s not about the new cert you earned over the weekend, but about the work you do every day. The words change every decade. The substance does not.
