The Expert Era of LinkedIn Is Over

AI turned expertise into a commodity almost overnight, and if you've ever felt you weren't expert enough to post, that's the best news you'll read this week. Here’s how to capitalize on the shift.

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Author's note: This is part two of a two-part series. Last week was the internal blocker — visibility shame, the reason you hold yourself back even when you know you should be posting. This week is the external one: the ground underneath the whole platform has shifted, and almost nobody is naming why. Once you see it, the thing you were afraid to show becomes the exact thing that works.

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Let me start with a question I saw on my feed last week that stopped me in my tracks and made me chuckle:

My chuckle response was that of recognition. Like a “Oh, there it is. We’ve all been wondering, and now someone is flat out asking.”

And I know you’ve felt this and asked it too. Judging just by the responses to that post and the comment section, Eric is hitting upon a real sensation we’ve all felt.

You've felt this very strangeness if you've opened the app lately. And then there's the piece that's been everywhere the last couple of weeks, where the New York Times asked whether LinkedIn is entering its post-cringe era and half the platform — up to and including LinkedIn's own CEO — reposted it to argue about the answer. There's also the running war over AI content, where one founder is raving about how a model 10x'd his output two posts above a writer ranting that the feed has been flooded with slop. And there's the older, quieter grumble that never quite goes away, that LinkedIn stopped being serious somewhere around the time people started announcing layoffs with selfies or sharing how their marriage proposal taught them about B2B sales (now a classic LinkedIn punchline).

Here's my take: these aren't three separate debates. There are three symptoms of one shift, and they are all, somehow, simultaneously true.

Yes, the “professional era” is ending — and AI is what ended it

We can stop pretending the old version is coming back. The era of LinkedIn as a place for polished expertise and buttoned-up professionalism is genuinely closing. But the reason isn't that people got lazy or that the algorithm rotted — it's that two things happened in sequence.

The first crack was COVID. The line between your home self and your work self evaporated overnight, and there was no putting it back. Time-stamped articles of the time capture this very cracking:

We were all waiting out the same unknown at the same time, on a very human level, and vulnerability took center stage because there was nothing else honest to do. I mean, there’s nothing quite like a mass pandemic that presents as an existential threat to humanity to make you question the point of the self-seriousness of the workplace. The platform had been loosening before that, but the pandemic is when it broke open — when the work/life line blurred, and people started sharing the actual texture of their lives, the buttoned-up default never fully recovered.

And then, right as some version of new normalcy started to settle in, there came AI. Which is where the real reordering happened.

A large language model has access to more or less all the knowledge that has ever been recorded on a given topic. Whatever your hard-won expertise is, some version of its informational content is now a single prompt away in ChatGPT or Claude, available to anyone, instantly, for free or close to it. And the iron law of supply and demand doesn’t care how long it took you to learn the thing. When the supply of something becomes nearly infinite, the demand for it — the price the market will pay for it — falls toward the floor. Excellent news for Anthropic, perhaps less excellent for your fancy 4-year degree.

That is exactly what has happened to raw expertise as a unit of content. The “5 hacks to optimize your X” post was valuable when that information was hard to find, and you were one of the few dispensing it. It is close to worthless now, because the reader can generate a more comprehensive version in the time it took to read your first bullet. Expertise hasn’t stopped mattering, it just stopped being scarce — and scarcity was the entire source of its value as content.

There's a second thing AI did, almost as a side effect, and it might be the more important one.

When the models started producing fluent corporate writing, they were essentially holding up a mirror — they wrote the way so many of us had trained ourselves to write in a professional setting. And run through that flawless, faintly robotic lens, the whole register suddenly read as satire. Self-serious. Self-indulgent. Strangely flat. We looked at the machine, doing a perfect impression of "professional LinkedIn voice," and realized the voice had been a bit ridiculous the entire time.

This is the engine underneath accounts like Best of LinkedIn, where people collect posts trying to push a genuine human experience through a stiff professional filter — the grief post that pivots to a hiring lesson, the wedding photo that becomes a parable about sales. The cringe isn't the humanity. The cringe is the juxtaposition, the visible effort of forcing something real into a corporate frame.

An Oxford Internet Institute researcher gave the cleanest version of this I've seen, in that same Times coverage: the underlying problem is sincerity. The instant you know an audience of employers and clients is watching, the instinct to optimize eats the authenticity you were trying to project — and people can feel the optimization. That feeling, the sense of watching someone “work the room,” is what we've been calling cringe all along. It was never the personal detail that made us wince as much as it was the performance wrapped around it.

So we've arrived somewhere new, and whether that lands as a relief or a threat to you depends on a single misunderstanding worth clearing up.

The new era rewards personality. And yes, some of your personality is silly — it's a little slapstick, it's the running bit you have with your work bestie, it's the stuff that makes people actually fond of you. That's allowed now. That's an asset now. But the misread that keeps serious people frozen is the assumption that unprofessional means unserious, and those are not the same thing at all.

Dropping the corporate filter doesn't mean dropping the substance. It means you can get gloriously specific. You can learn out loud. You can build out loud. You can document your iterations and your dead ends. You can say the things on a wider stage that you'd normally only say to a friend across the desk (unless you’re an a-hole and say terrible things—but I’m operating under the premise you are kind and smart).

The more you do this, the less cringe you become — because cringe was more the sound of someone synthesizing themselves into a corporate robot, trying to sound perfect, and you’ve stopped doing the thing that produced it.

What you get back is enormous. You get the liberty to talk about a trial, a failure, a specific bet you’re placing, a real update from inside the work, or a little tee hee about your industry — without first routing it through an internal PR department that only ever existed inside your own head, invented to win the respect of colleagues and clients who, it turns out, would rather just hear from a person.

If some part of you has been hanging back on building your brand here because you're convinced you're not smart enough, or senior enough, or that you don't have enough clever hacks to justify taking up space — I want you to feel the weight come off, because that barrier is simply gone.

The hacks aren't the differentiator anymore. Neither is the encyclopedic knowledge. All of it is a prompt away, for everyone, which means none of it can set you apart. What people now want from you is the combination no model can generate: your specific expertise, filtered through your specific personality. The exact thing you were tempted to leave out is the only thing that was ever going to distinguish you.

Yes, and no, and kind of! Here’s an email I recently got from Jay Clouse, which is proving my point here:

Expertise delivered in the form of information alone is not a comprehensive revenue plan. But Kaitttttt, sure it is! People are subscribing to Substacks, and Jessi Jean just had a $1.2 million launch of her YAP Challenge.

Ok, sure. But hear me out. What people are ultimately paying for is transformation (that is not new or novel). So, not the information about how to change, but the experience of actually being changed and the end picture of what happens when change has occurred.

They also pay for execution — not knowing what to do, but having it done with them/for them. This is particularly valuable now, as people enter endless loops of “what aboutisms,” armed with AI-generated ammo but too paralyzed to even start. (I’d bet you the farm in all our AI chat histories, there are multiple concepts of million-dollar businesses; and I’d bet that same amount of money that none of them will come to fruition. All of us are too excited and overwhelmed by the steps to start. Admit it!) This is why cohorts are on the rise now: the opportunity to learn alongside you in real time.

And in the most real and least discussed sense of all, they pay for proximity — to be near the people they admire.

That last one makes people flinch, so let me be the one to say it plainly. Think about how much you would pay for genuine access to one of your own business mentors. I've done it, more than once. I've been in awe of someone, wanted them to simply know who I was, wanted to be in their orbit. It's a big part of why I joined the aforementioned Jay Clouse's Creator Science Lab — I'd followed him for years, and I understood that in a world where he has tens of thousands of followers, getting inside his community meant I'd become a real face to him and to other people I admired, and that I'd get to invest in the experiences that put me in those rooms. If that strikes you as a little crazy, or self-absorbed, or cringe, I'd push back: people pay great money to be close to people they respect, and always have. (I’ve had clients pay GOOD money to attend a Richard Branson Necker Island weekend). I am not too proud to admit I have put myself in rooms and paid for the privilege so that the right people would know my name.

That is the LinkedIn era we're actually in. Not the death of expertise — the repricing of it and the restructuring of the package it’s delivered in, and the rise of everything expertise was never able to be on its own.

If you want an entry point that isn’t “post more and hope,” it comes down to three questions, and every one of them rewards specificity over polish:

• What specific stories and lessons have I actually lived? Not the generalized takeaway — the real one, with the texture and the part where it didn’t go to plan.
• What specific bets am I placing right now? Name the thing you’re trying that might not work. Let people watch the wager, not just the victory lap.
• What specific parts of my personality can I let show? The bit, the obsession, the strong opinion, the way you actually talk when the filter’s off.

Answer those honestly, and you’ll never again wonder what to post, because you’ll have stopped trying to sound like an expert and started sounding like the one specific person you are.

🎁To help you work through these questions and more...here's a FREE gift:

​The AI-Proof Personal Brand Audit​

Use this free workbook to determine if your personal brand is ready for the new era of LinkedIn:

See how much of your content is expertise-only, reflects personality, and is distinguishable from AI-generated content. And, determine where you are still hiding your uniqueness.

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Last week, the thing standing in your way was internal — the visibility shame that makes being seen feel dangerous. This week, it's the opposite kind of news: the game itself has changed, and it changed in favor of exactly the parts of you that you were hiding. The platform spent a decade rewarding the polished and the credentialed. It's now rewarding the specific and the human. You happen to have an unfair supply of both.

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The good news?

The future doesn't belong to the person with the most expertise.

It belongs to the person who knows how to package that expertise into a recognizable reputation.

That's exactly what we do inside Brand Inner Circle.​

If you're ready to become known for your ideas—not just good at your work—I'd love to support you.

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