Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
For most of the last two decades, a meaningful part of professional value came from being able to produce things other people couldn't easily produce themselves: a polished analysis, a well-structured plan, a clean piece of execution. That kind of value is rapidly becoming table stakes, available to almost anyone with a clear enough prompt and a few minutes of patience.
What doesn't commoditise at the same rate is the judgment that decides what's actually worth producing in the first place, and whether the output, once generated, is any good. I think that judgment, close to what's usually called taste, is quietly becoming one of the few genuinely defensible professional skills left.
Taste, in this sense, isn't really about aesthetics, though it includes them. It's the capacity to look at ten plausible options and know, with real confidence, which one is actually right for this specific situation, not generically good, but right here, for this audience, at this moment, given everything else that's true about the context. That kind of judgment has always been valuable. It's becoming disproportionately more valuable now, for a specific reason: the cost of generating the ten plausible options has collapsed to almost nothing, which means the bottleneck has shifted entirely from production to selection, and most people are still allocating their effort as though production were still the hard part.
This shows up clearly in how strategic work is actually changing day to day. A junior analyst, or increasingly a senior one, can generate a competent first draft of a market analysis, a positioning document, a campaign brief, in a fraction of the time it used to take, and that draft is often genuinely solid. What it isn't, reliably, is right. It's plausible, professionally formatted, internally consistent, and frequently slightly off in ways that matter enormously and aren't obvious from the document itself. Catching that gap, knowing why this version, despite looking correct, is the wrong one for this specific business at this specific moment, requires a kind of pattern recognition that doesn't come from being faster at producing options. It comes from having seen enough real situations, with real consequences, to recognise when something that looks right is actually a subtly wrong fit.
This is the capability that seems to transfer most reliably across categories, and resist commoditisation most stubbornly, once you're watching several businesses face similar-looking decisions produce different outcomes for reasons that weren't obvious on the surface. Not the ability to generate a strategy document. The ability to look at three competently generated options and know, often before being able to fully articulate why, which one will actually work in this specific market, with this specific team, given this specific history. That judgment doesn't show up in a prompt. It shows up after enough pattern exposure that the wrong choice starts to feel wrong before anyone can prove it on paper.
What makes this genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of professionals to sit with is that taste is much harder to teach, credential, or demonstrate quickly than technical competence ever was. You can show someone a portfolio of polished outputs. It's much harder to show someone a track record of consistently correct judgment calls, especially early in a career, before there's been enough time to accumulate the pattern exposure that judgment actually requires. Which means the people who already have it are about to become disproportionately valuable, and the path to acquiring it for everyone else just got considerably less obvious, exactly at the moment it matters more.
Worth noticing next time you're reviewing work, your own or someone else's, that was competently produced: are you evaluating whether it's technically correct, or whether it's actually the right call for this specific situation? Most review processes are still built entirely around the first question, at the exact moment the second question is where the real value has moved.
Production is becoming cheap, fast, and broadly accessible to almost anyone.
Knowing what's actually worth producing, and recognizing when a polished, plausible answer is quietly the wrong one, is not something a faster tool can substitute for. It's increasingly the entire difference between work that's competent and work that's correct.
Every business has its own version of this story. If you're working through something similar, drop me a note at [email protected]. Whether it's to exchange ideas, brainstorm a challenge, or just have a thoughtful conversation, I'm always happy to make time for a complimentary 30-minute chat.