Taste is just judgment, renamed

“Taste is the new moat in the AI era.” I’ve now heard this enough times that it’s become a little bit cliché. It’s true enough to repeat and vague enough to never be wrong. That’s usually the sign a phrase has stopped doing any work.

The idea is simple. AI can automate the production of creative work faster than most industries can reproduce the taste that tells good from bad. So taste is what’s left, and taste is scarce. Fine. But almost nobody who says this will tell you what taste actually is in a specific job. It floats above design, writing, a few consumer products, and stops there.

That’s the weak part, and it needs a better angle. Not “does taste matter” — obviously it does — but what taste means for different industries, and specifically that it’s not just creatives.

Here’s the sharper claim. Taste is the creative world’s word for domain judgment: knowing what’s good enough and appropriate in a particular context, and knowing what to leave out. A designer calls it taste. A consultant calls it judgment. They’re closer to the same skill than either would admit.

Take consulting, which I know best. The scarce thing was never the deck. Anyone can generate a deck now. The scarce thing is knowing which analysis actually matters to this board, which recommendation they’ll accept and which is technically right but dead on arrival, and which slide to cut. That’s taste. It just never got the flattering name, because it doesn’t produce a pretty object.

This connects to something I wrote before: agent work makes judgment more important because it makes action less scarce. “Taste” is what that judgment looks like once you can see it, once production is cheap enough that the only thing left to be good at is choosing. Same move in creative work, in professional services, and, I’d bet, in engineering, law, and operations too.

The honest counterpoint: maybe I’m stretching the word until it snaps. If taste means aesthetic judgment and board-reading and engineering restraint all at once, maybe it means nothing, and I should just say “judgment” and drop the borrowed glamour. That’s fair. The word might be doing less work than the “moat” framing pretends.

But I don’t think the framing is empty. I think it’s mislabeled. The people who do well as AI makes production cheap won’t be the ones with better taste in the narrow sense. They’ll be the ones who can look at ten cheap options and know which one should exist. In a design studio we call that taste. In a client meeting we call it judgment. It’s the same person.

That’s the seedling. The next version needs the parts only I can add: where I’ve watched taste decide a room, and where the word finally breaks.