The Value of Taste

Why skills aren’t enough in the AI era

Author

Isaac Peiris
September 23, 2025

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, where we’ve worked with brands like BuzzFeed and Clay to understand their audience, build trust and deliver measurable outcomes through content-led growth.

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The Value of Taste

I used to be pretty good at Facebook ads. I could wrangle Ads Manager with granular audience targeting, layered demographics and precise interest combinations.

Then we hired a paid ads specialist who told us to throw all of that away.

"Don't use any targeting parameters," he said. "Just let the algorithm figure out the best audience for itself."

I was shocked. Years of carefully developed expertise in audience building, A/B testing, understanding platform nuances. All of it suddenly irrelevant. The algorithm could do it better with zero human input.

Sure enough, it worked. Performance improved dramatically. I realised that a whole skillset I'd spent years developing was now essentially worthless.

This is part of something bigger happening across marketing. The capabilities we've worked hardest to master are being automated faster than we can adapt. We're all running faster and faster just to stay in place.

But what if we're optimising for the wrong capabilities entirely?

Skills vs Taste

To understand why this moment feels different, we need to look at how skill transfer has evolved throughout history.

Before the Industrial Revolution, there was no standardised education system. Skilled trades were family businesses passed down through generations. You became a blacksmith because your father was one and you watched him work, absorbing techniques refined over decades. These skills had extraordinary longevity to be passed down through generations. The fundamentals of metalworking remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Then the factory system changed everything. Mass production required workers with standardised capabilities rather than artisanal expertise. This largely birthed our modern education system, modelled on military efficiency with uniforms, information delivery and testing of memorisation. The goal was to produce workers who could slot into predetermined roles.

(The fact that education systems still largely operate in this same way is a topic for another day…)

But the reason that system worked for over a century was that the skills you learned would last your entire lifetime. An engineer who mastered mechanical principles in university could apply them for forty years. An accountant who understood financial systems saw no fundamental changes to their discipline.

In 2017, new research began documenting how this system was breaking down. Their findings showed that while older generations may have 5 jobs along a single career path, young people would likely experience about 17 job changes across 5 different careers throughout their lifetime. The era of single-skill, single-career paths was ending.

But even that research couldn't predict what we're seeing now. AI has compressed the lifespan of a skill from years to months. The capabilities that once defined entire careers now become obsolete before people finish learning them.

We’ve felt it in the marketing field. Facebook's automated bidding eliminated manual campaign optimisation expertise that took years to develop. ChatGPT made copywriting skills accessible to anyone. Google Analytics' AI insights reduced the value of data analysis capabilities that once commanded premium salaries.

The harsh reality is that learning can't keep pace anymore.

So what survives when everything else falls away? Taste.

Skills are replicable. Teachable. Automatable. Taste is something fundamentally different. It's the capacity to make aesthetic judgements that create new cultural territory rather than just optimising within existing frameworks.

There's a critical distinction here that lots of people miss. We often confuse taste with curation, but they're entirely different capabilities.

Curation asks "which of these options is best?" It's about selecting from existing choices. AI is incredibly good at this and only getting better. Algorithms can analyse thousands of design variations, test messaging approaches and recommend the highest-performing options.

On the other hand, taste asks "what's missing?" It's about creating new territory through conviction rather than validation. It's the difference between choosing between available options and imagining something that doesn't exist yet.

Tony's Chocolonely designed chocolate bars with deliberately unequal pieces. This defied every principle of frictionless customer experiences, but it created a physical representation of inequality in cocoa farming, the issue Tony’s was created to draw attention to. The "flaw" became their most distinctive feature.

Supreme built strategic friction into every customer interaction. Long queues, limited stock, cryptic Instagram posts. This contradicted every UX best practice, but it transformed scarcity from a problem into a brand asset.

Oatly put conversational copy directly on their packaging, ignoring every category convention about dairy alternatives. Instead of apologetic health claims, they wrote things like "It's like milk, but made for humans". This unique tone of voice has become their competitive moat.

None of these decisions would have emerged from algorithmic optimisation. They required individual conviction that seemed wrong until it proved to be transformational.

Developing Your Taste

Taste doesn't come from market research or A/B testing. It develops through lived experience and often appears counterintuitive before revealing its logic.

Van Gogh sold exactly one painting during his lifetime, but his work now defines post-impressionist art with one painting selling for $117.2 million in 2022.

The opportunity for marketers in this pattern is that authentic conviction matters more than technical proficiency. Instead of chasing the latest AI tools, focus on defining perspectives that competitors don't have. Ask "what's missing from this category?" rather than "what's working for others?"

When asked what he brings to recording sessions, music producer Rick Rubin famously said "I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music. The confidence I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists". Rubin doesn't operate a sound board or play instruments. He provides direction and conviction. He knows what should exist even when he can't create it himself. Just like AI can help us handle the technical execution while we humans still provide the creative direction.

It’s a partnership model that works across any number of applications. AI for execution, humans for direction. The machine can optimise within parameters, but only human taste can set those parameters in the first place.

Contemporary brands like Liquid Death demonstrate the principle. They built a water company around heavy metal aesthetics that no algorithm would have recommended. Or Glossier, who developed an anti-perfectionist beauty philosophy that contradicted industry standards about flawless imagery. Both decisions seemed wrong until they created new market categories.

The pattern shows us that breakthrough work defies optimisation logic. The campaigns that have the most impact often start by rejecting what everyone else considers best practice.

The Strategic Reality

As technical execution becomes table stakes, differentiation shifts from "how" to "what" and "why". Marketing that follows optimisation logic blends into background noise because everyone has access to the same AI tools and best practices.

The brands breaking through are the ones confident enough in their perspective to create something genuinely different. They use AI as an amplifier for ideas that only humans can originate.

That doesn't mean abandoning data or ignoring performance metrics. It means understanding that optimisation can only improve what already exists. Creating something new requires a different capability entirely.

The marketers who thrive in this environment won't be those chasing the latest automation tool. They'll be those who develop confidence in perspectives that can't be automated, validated or replicated by competitors.

Where AI can execute any campaign concept, knowing what's worth creating becomes the scarce resource. Technical skills will keep evolving faster than we can learn them. But taste develops differently, through exposure, experimentation and the courage to trust your instincts even when they contradict conventional wisdom.

The question becomes less about whether your marketing is optimised and more about whether it’s worth optimising in the first place.

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