A tech CEO who cut his staff from over 1,000 to 120 says AI is boosting the value of 'high-agency' generalists

Bird's CEO Robert Vis says AI is making high-agency generalists more valuable at work.

Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg via Getty Images Bird CEO Robert Vis said AI gives an edge to 'high agency' generalists who can work across roles.

Bird's head count has dropped from more than 1,000 to 120 as AI automates more tasks.

"If you had very high performance but you were not multidisciplinary, you would not stay," he said.

Being a specialist may be getting harder at some AI-powered companies.

"The profile that we were very focused on was people with high agency," Robert Vis, the CEO of communications infrastructure company Bird, told Business Insider.

"If you're high agency and you're full stack, then AI leverages you to basically be your best self." Vis made the comments in late September after Bird announced that it had completed $450 million in debt financing led by JPMorgan, Capital One, and Citi.

The company also said its head count fell from more than 1,000 people to 120 over roughly three years as it automated more of its operations and favored employees with high agency and multidisciplinary skills.

Vis said AI is helping employees work across tasks that companies have historically treated as distinct roles.

In engineering, for example, he said the technology favors people who understand not just how to write code but also how a product should work.

"If you're an engineer and you're extremely good at just code but you have no product sense, that wouldn't work at Bird," he said.

A new kind of generalist Vis isn't the first executive to argue that AI could give an edge to workers with range and initiative.

Figma CEO Dylan Field has said the technology is empowering " generalist behavior " as the once-distinct worlds of product, design, development, and research start to blur.

Ravi Kumar, CEO of Cognizant, has similarly said workers who combine subject expertise with technological skills may become more relevant than people with narrow expertise alone.