The Taste Advantage: Curation as Most Valuable Skill in the Age of AI

When AI can make anything, the person who knows what’s worth making becomes the most valuable person in the room.

Taste, the ability to discern what is good from what is merely competent, is becoming the scarcest and most valuable skill in business. AI can now generate 34 million images a day. Over half of new web content is AI-written. Europol estimates that 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. When production is infinite and nearly free, the bottleneck moves from “can we make this?” to “should we make this?” And that second question is a question of taste.

This isn’t about aesthetics, though aesthetics matter. Taste is how you make decisions when the data doesn’t tell you what to do. It’s the reason one brand feels inevitable while another feels forgettable, even when their features are identical. It’s the filter that separates signal from noise in a world drowning in content. And it’s the skill that AI can’t replicate, because AI is a mirror. It reflects patterns from what already exists. Taste is a compass. It points toward what should exist next.

I’ve spent my career in the space between creation and curation, from producing underground events that introduced new sounds to the US, to launching Star Wars products at Lucasfilm, to positioning startups in categories that didn’t exist yet. In every one of those contexts, the competitive advantage was never who could produce the most. It was who could choose the best. This essay is about why that advantage is about to become the defining one in business, and how it’s developed.

Why is taste becoming more valuable as AI gets better?

The economics of creation have collapsed. What once required teams, budgets, and months of production can now be generated in seconds. A single marketer with AI tools can produce 72 social media posts per week. An AI image platform produces 34 million images daily. Ahrefs found that 74.2% of new web pages published in April 2025 contained detectable AI-generated content. The Graphite study of 65,000 URLs found that over 50% of new English-language articles were primarily AI-written by late 2024, up from just 5% before ChatGPT launched.

But here’s the paradox that matters: as production becomes cheaper, consumer trust in AI-generated content is falling. Consumer enthusiasm for AI-created content dropped from 60% to 26% in just two years (Billion Dollar Boy/Censuswide). 52% of consumers say they would trust a brand less if they discovered its content was purely AI-generated. 62% say they still prefer a human touch in long-form storytelling. Americans estimate that only 41% of online material is accurate and human-generated.

This creates a specific economic dynamic: supply of content is exploding while trust in that content is collapsing. The gap between those two curves is where taste lives. In a world of infinite production, the person or company that can consistently choose the right thing to make, say, or ship becomes disproportionately valuable. As one design strategist put it, taste is no longer a soft add-on to creativity. It is the connective tissue between perception, judgment, and power.

What is taste, actually, and why can’t AI replicate it?

Taste is often dismissed as subjective preference. Something you either have or you don’t. But taste is not opinion. It’s a skill built through exposure, critical thinking, and lived experience. It’s cultural fluency, emotional intelligence, historical awareness, and sensitivity to quality operating simultaneously. It’s knowing when something is off, even when you can’t fully articulate why. And it’s knowing when something is right, even when the data hasn’t confirmed it yet.

AI systems can’t replicate taste because they operate as pattern recognition engines. They excel at analyzing datasets and generating combinations based on learned patterns. They can perfect existing styles. But they can’t determine when those styles should evolve or be abandoned. As Elizabeth Goodspeed wrote in her influential essay for It’s Nice That, AI can’t give you good taste. It can execute at speed. It can generate variations. But it can’t tell you which variation matters, which one will resonate in six months rather than today, or which one communicates something true about who you are as a company.

This is why the shift happening in professional work is not from human to AI, but from execution to curation. Marketing professionals who once competed on their ability to write compelling copy now compete on their ability to direct AI while exercising judgment about brand voice, audience resonance, and strategic messaging. Financial analysts who once spent 70% of their time gathering data now spend that time interpreting AI analyses, questioning model assumptions, and identifying what the model missed. In every field, the core skill is migrating from production to discernment. And discernment is another word for taste.

How does taste show up in business decisions?

Taste isn’t limited to design, though design is where most people first recognize it. In business, taste operates in at least four critical domains:

Positioning: When I was at Eidos working on the Tomb Raider franchise during its revitalization, there was pressure to position it as a technical showcase. Better graphics, bigger environments, more weapons. The competitive set was doing exactly that. But the taste decision was to go the other direction entirely and anchor the positioning on what Lara Croft represented: resilience, intelligence, independence. We led the market research and competitive analysis, studied what the core audience actually responded to emotionally (not just functionally), and made the call to revitalize the brand around identity rather than features. That’s a decision the data didn’t dictate. A feature comparison would have led to a completely different campaign. Taste is what made it a brand that outlived multiple game cycles instead of a product that competed on specs.

Brand: Rick Rubin made this point beautifully in The Creative Act: the producer’s job isn’t to add things. It’s to recognize what’s already there and remove everything that isn’t essential. Brand taste works the same way. The best brands aren’t the ones that say the most. They’re the ones that know what to leave out. When I helped position Relativity Space as the leading brand in “new space,” the taste decision was to anchor the story on autonomous manufacturing and 3D-printed rockets rather than competing on launch cost. Every competitor was talking about cost per kilogram. We chose to talk about the future of how things get built. That’s not a messaging exercise. It’s a taste call about which story deserves to exist.

Product: When I was developing promotions and experiential programs for the Nintendo Wii, the taste decision was to position the console around inclusivity and shared joy rather than technical specs. Grandparents bowling with grandchildren. Families competing together at holiday parties. That curation choice, to reject the hardcore gaming status hierarchy in favor of something warmer and more human, is why the Wii outsold every console of its generation. The technology wasn’t superior. The taste was.

Where does taste come from?

Taste is not innate. It’s accumulated. And I think most people underestimate how varied the inputs need to be.

My own sense of taste was forged across domains that don’t usually appear on the same resume. Gaming. Aerospace. SaaS. Twenty years of producing art, fashion, and music events on the side, where curating a lineup is a taste exercise: you’re making dozens of micro-decisions about sequence, contrast, energy arc, and audience readiness. You’re reading a room in real time and adjusting. That training, thousands of hours of real-time feedback on whether your taste was right, is something no business school teaches.

Before events, I spent nearly a decade in interactive entertainment at Ubisoft, Eidos, Lucasfilm, and Nintendo. Launching Star Wars products is an exercise in taste at massive scale. The IP is the most recognizable in entertainment, but every product still requires hundreds of decisions about tone, audience, messaging, partnerships, and creative direction. We tripled projected sales on LEGO Star Wars I through a viral and co-marketing strategy, but the creative choices that made that campaign work were taste choices: knowing which partnerships would feel organic versus forced, which messaging would excite core fans without alienating casual buyers, which visual language would honor the franchise without being derivative.

Running digital campaigns for Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Burberry, and Williams Sonoma taught me something the tech world rarely talks about: “premium” is not a price point. It’s a feeling, and that feeling is different for every audience. The taste required for a Mercedes-Benz thought leadership campaign (authority, measured confidence, intellectual weight) is categorically different from the taste required for a Nintendo Wii promotion (warmth, inclusivity, play) or an underground rave flyer (edge, discovery, belonging). But the underlying muscle is the same: pattern recognition across culture, and the discipline to say no to things that are good enough but not right.

This is the part that makes taste hard to hire for and impossible to automate. It’s built through cross-domain exposure. The person who has only ever worked in SaaS marketing has SaaS taste. The person who has moved through gaming, entertainment, events, luxury brands, aerospace, Web3, and consumer tech has a different kind of palette. Neither is better in the abstract. But in a world where AI handles execution and the competitive advantage shifts to judgment, the breadth of your inputs determines the quality of your outputs.

How do you develop taste as a competitive advantage?

Taste can be cultivated, but not through the methods most business culture values. You don’t develop taste by optimizing dashboards or reading best practice guides. You develop it through three specific disciplines:

1. Expand your inputs obsessively. Taste comes from the library of references you’ve built through exposure. The more varied and high-quality the inputs, the better the judgment. Read outside your industry. Attend events outside your comfort zone. Study how premium brands in unrelated fields make decisions. The reason fashion, music, and architecture produce disproportionate numbers of people with extraordinary taste is that those fields require constant immersion in aesthetic judgment. Tech culture tends to optimize for efficiency. But efficiency without taste produces competent mediocrity.

2. Practice choosing, not just consuming. Consumption builds the reference library. Choosing is what converts it into judgment. Every time you make a decision about what to ship, what to cut, what to say no to, you’re exercising taste. AI makes this more important, not less, because execution has become cheap. You can generate five versions of anything in an hour. But the model won’t tell you which one is best. If you can’t articulate “why this one,” you’re not practicing taste. You’re sampling.

3. Seek friction from reality. Taste developed in isolation becomes self-referential. You need contact with real audiences, real markets, real consequences. The most honest feedback mechanism I’ve ever experienced is a live room: if your judgment is wrong, the energy drains. If it’s right, the room fills and the momentum compounds. That real-time, full-body feedback loop is something every founder and marketer should seek, whether through user testing, direct sales conversations, or any other context where the market’s response is immediate and unfiltered.

Why does taste matter for what comes next?

We are entering a period where production costs approach zero and the volume of content, products, and experiences being generated will exceed human capacity to process. Europol estimates 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. The AI content creation market is projected to grow from $2.15 billion in 2024 to $10.59 billion by 2033. When everyone can make everything, the advantage belongs to whoever can choose the right thing.

This has profound implications for founders, investors, and anyone building technology. The companies that win the next decade won’t be the ones that produce the most. They will be the ones with the best filters. The best taste. The clearest sense of what deserves to exist and what is just noise. This is true for product development, for marketing, for community design, and for platform architecture.

It is also, I believe, one of the reasons why the next generation of great technology companies will be built by people with backgrounds outside of technology. People who trained their taste in music, design, fashion, architecture, film, hospitality. People who understand that the human experience of quality is not a metric. It’s a feeling. And that feeling is the last thing AI can’t generate.

The most valuable skill in the age of AI is not the ability to create. It’s the wisdom to know what’s worth creating, and the taste to make that judgment well.

I built my taste over twenty years in rooms where the feedback was immediate: product launches, brand campaigns, positioning war rooms, live audiences. The through line was always the same question: Is this right? Not right according to the data. Not right according to the brief. Right in the way that makes someone stop scrolling, lean in, tell a friend, come back.

If this resonated:

For founders: I help startups develop the positioning, brand, and narrative taste that makes the difference between a product that ships and a company that matters. Through Wondr Venture Studio and fractional CMO engagements, this is the work I do.

For leaders navigating AI: If you’re building in a world of infinite production and wondering what your competitive edge actually is, I speak about taste, curation, and human judgment at conferences and leadership events.

For everyone: Subscribe for essays like this, or share it with someone drowning in AI-generated sameness who needs to remember that taste still wins.

About the Author:
Maly Ly is the Founder & CEO of Wondr, an AI-native social and discovery platform, and the founder of a growth lab advising early-stage startups. She is a founder, growth executive, and operator who has helped scale multiple startups to breakout growth and unicorn status across AI, Web3, aerospace, SaaS, and consumer tech.

Her experience includes leadership roles at category-defining companies such as AdRoll—named the Inc. 500’s #1 Fastest Growing Marketing Company—and Relativity Space, which reached a $2.3 billion valuation and became the second most valuable private space company after SpaceX. She has also held leadership positions at Eventbrite, Sojern, YouCaring (later acquired by GoFundMe), and SecurityPal AI, and earlier in her career helped launch top-selling products for franchises including Star Wars, Tomb Raider, and Nintendo.

Beyond tech, Maly spent two decades producing art, music, and both corporate and underground events, while leading digital campaigns for global brands including Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Burberry, and Williams Sonoma. She is also a Certified High Performance Coach.

Her work has been recognized by Forbes, Fast Company, and Direct Marketing News with its Hall of Femme honor. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Forbes, The Tonight Show, and The Ellen Show.