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

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.

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.

The trend is not universal, however.

Business Insider previously reported that consulting firms are increasingly prioritizing specialists with deep industry or technical expertise as AI erodes the value of broad strategy work.

At Bird, however, Vis said AI is widening the work employees can take on beyond engineering.

The tools can help workers operate within design systems or automate routine parts of support, sales, and accounting. “It’s not like you need zero designers, but you need less, and it enables entire teams to be able to output good design within a framework that a design team sets,” Vis said.

That does not mean every specialist role disappears, Vis said, noting that Bird still employs specialists like a revenue accountant and security engineers.

The company’s layoffs involved a qualitative assessment of whether workers were multidisciplinary, performing strongly, and wanted to work in a more autonomous environment. “If you had very high performance but you were not multidisciplinary, you would not stay,” Vis said.

The Amsterdam-founded company said it generated $165 million in EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a common measure of operating performance — in 2025 after extensively automating its operations.

Still, Vis said companies should not use AI simply as a pretext to cut workers.

Instead, he said, leaders should identify repetitive tasks that no longer need to be done and assess whether AI can remove them without overburdening the people who remain. “I don’t think people should be looking to reduce their employee base,” Vis said. “The moment you are struggling to have certain employees perform well within your environment or have a certain amount of output, then I think AI is a good tool to automate more of this.”