The New Creative Currency—Why Taste Outranks Talent in the AI Era

The New Creative Currency—Why Taste Outranks Talent in the AI Era

In a world where AI can do almost everything, the only thing it can't do is decide what's worth doing.

That's the paradox of our current moment. We've built machines that can write convincing copy in seconds, edit videos faster than human teams, and generate code that would take developers hours to write.

Yet despite this technical revolution, the most successful creators, marketers, and business leaders aren't the ones with the best AI prompts… they're the ones with the best judgment about what to create in the first place.

Welcome to the taste economy, where the ability to discern, curate, and direct creative vision has become more valuable than any technical skill.

The Great Skill Obsolescence

Let's be real about what's happening: 75% of marketers now use AI tools for content creation, with the average marketer saving 2.5 hours per day through automation. Meanwhile, 83% report that AI-generated content produces similar or better results than human-only creation.

The technical barriers that once separated good creators from great ones are crumbling:

Copywriting: AI can now draft compelling headlines, email sequences, and social posts that convert. Jasper AI users report 80% time savings on content creation tasks.

Design: Tools like Midjourney and DALL-E create publication-ready visuals in minutes. Adobe reports that 73% of creatives now incorporate AI into their workflows.

Video editing: AI-powered platforms reduce editing time by up to 90% for routine cuts and transitions.

Web development: GitHub Copilot helps developers write code 55% faster, while no-code platforms eliminate technical barriers entirely.

The skills that once took years to master can now be approximated by anyone with the right prompts and patience.

But when everyone has access to the same technical capabilities, the competitive advantage shifts entirely to creative judgment.

Taste: The Skill That Can't Be Automated

What exactly is "taste" in a business context?

It's not about aesthetic preferences or cultural snobbery. Professional taste is the ability to consistently identify what will resonate with specific audiences at specific moments, and more importantly, what won't.

Taste is pattern recognition across culture, not just data. While AI can analyze conversion rates and engagement metrics, it can't intuit why a particular tone will feel authentic to your audience next month, or why a visual style that works for one brand would feel forced for another.

Taste is knowing what not to do. The most valuable creative professionals aren't just good at making things—they're exceptional at killing ideas that look good on paper but feel wrong in practice. As Dieter Rams famously said about design, "Good design is as little design as possible." The same principle applies to marketing: the best campaigns are often defined by what they leave out.

Taste is cultural timing. AI can tell you what performed well last quarter, but it can't sense the cultural undercurrents that will make last quarter's winning strategy feel stale tomorrow. Consider how quickly brand communications had to evolve during the pandemic—not because the technical skills changed, but because the cultural context shifted overnight.

Research from MIT shows that human-AI collaboration produces the most effective creative work specifically because humans provide the strategic direction while AI handles execution. The study found that teams with strong human creative oversight achieved 23% better outcomes than purely AI-generated content.

The Tastemaker Advantage

The most successful people in creative industries have always been curators first, creators second. Consider some of the most influential figures:

Anna Wintour doesn't design clothes—she decides which designers and trends get cultural oxygen. Her influence comes from her ability to spot what matters before others do.

Rick Rubin doesn't play instruments, but his taste in sound and artist development has shaped decades of music across genres. He's a curator of creative potential.

Casey Neistat built his influence not just through filmmaking skills, but through an unmistakable sense of what makes content feel authentic versus manufactured.

In marketing, the same pattern emerges. Dollar Shave Club's viral video succeeded not because of sophisticated production techniques, but because someone had the taste to greenlight an irreverent approach that perfectly matched their brand positioning and target audience. Similarly, Liquid Death's entire brand strategy succeeds because someone had the judgment to position water like an energy drink—a decision that probably seemed insane in focus groups but proved brilliant in practice.

The common thread? These successes came from strategic vision and cultural intuition, not technical execution.

Why AI Makes Taste More Valuable, Not Less

Counter-intuitively, AI doesn't diminish the value of good taste—it amplifies it exponentially. When execution becomes easier, the leverage on good decision-making becomes massive.

Bad taste scales instantly: With AI, one poor creative decision can be amplified across hundreds of pieces of content in hours. A misguided campaign concept that might have died in the execution phase can now flood your channels with mediocre content.

Good taste creates multiplicative advantages: When you make the right strategic choices about positioning, voice, and creative direction, AI can help you execute that vision across every touchpoint consistently and efficiently. Brands with consistent presentation see 23% revenue growth, and AI makes that consistency achievable at scale.

The gap between good and great widens: In a world where everyone can produce decent content, the brands with exceptional taste and clear creative vision pull further ahead of the competition. Research from Bain & Company shows that companies with superior brand experiences see 4-8% revenue growth above their market.

This is why platforms like Averi focus on amplifying human creative judgment rather than replacing it.

The system combines AI execution capabilities with curated expert networks, recognizing that the most valuable element isn't the content generation—it's the strategic thinking that guides what gets created and why.

The New Creative Hierarchy

In the AI era, creative teams are reorganizing around a new hierarchy of value:

Tier 1: Visionaries and Tastemakers

• Brand strategists who define creative direction

• Creative directors who set aesthetic and tonal standards

• Cultural critics who spot emerging trends and shifts

• Executive producers who shape overall creative vision

Tier 2: AI-Augmented Specialists

• Art directors who brief AI tools and refine outputs

• Copywriters who develop strategic messaging frameworks

• Editors who curate and refine AI-generated content

• Performance marketers who optimize AI-driven campaigns

Tier 3: Pure Execution

• Increasingly automated technical tasks

• Routine content production

• Basic design and copywriting tasks

• Standard reporting and analysis

The opportunity is clear: move up the hierarchy by developing better taste, or risk being automated out of relevance.

Case Study: How Taste Transforms AI Output

Consider two companies launching similar SaaS products:

Company A uses AI to generate hundreds of pieces of content based on competitor analysis and keyword research. Their content is technically proficient, SEO-optimized, and covers all the expected topics. It's also completely forgettable.

Company B uses the same AI tools, but applies strong creative judgment: they identify a unique brand voice that feels authentic to their team, they focus on specific use cases their competitors ignore, and they maintain strict quality standards about what content actually ships. Their AI-generated content feels distinctively theirs.

The difference isn't in the technology—it's in the taste applied to directing that technology. Company B's creative leaders make better decisions about positioning, voice, and editorial strategy. The AI simply amplifies those decisions.

This is exactly the approach Averi enables: combining AI-powered execution with expert human judgment.

The platform doesn't just generate content—it connects brands with creative professionals who can provide the strategic direction that makes AI output truly effective.

Developing Professional Taste

Unlike technical skills, taste can't be learned through tutorials or boot camps. It develops through exposure, experimentation, and critical thinking:

Study excellence across disciplines: The best marketers often draw inspiration from film, architecture, literature, and art. Research shows that innovative leaders actively seek diverse experiences and cross-pollinate ideas between fields.

Develop strong opinions: Taste requires conviction. Practice articulating why certain creative choices work or don't work. Build frameworks for creative decision-making rather than relying purely on intuition.

Embrace cultural fluency: Stay connected to the cultural movements, memes, and conversations that shape your audience's worldview. Morning Consult research shows that brands seen as culturally relevant see 50% higher purchase consideration.

Learn to kill your darlings: Good taste means being ruthless about quality standards. Practice saying no to good ideas in service of great ones.

Seek feedback from diverse perspectives: Taste isn't developed in isolation. Regularly seek input from people with different backgrounds, ages, and cultural perspectives.

The Averi Advantage: Taste + Execution at Scale

Here's where most marketing teams get stuck: they know what good looks like, but they lack the bandwidth to execute at the level their taste demands.

They either compromise on quality to maintain velocity, or they maintain standards but sacrifice speed and scale.

Averi solves this dilemma by combining AI-powered execution with access to curated creative experts who understand the strategic nuance that makes content truly effective. Instead of choosing between taste and scale, marketing leaders can have both:

Strategic briefing and direction from experienced brand strategists and creative directors who understand positioning, voice, and cultural context.

AI-amplified execution that takes strategic concepts and translates them into polished, on-brand content across channels.

Quality assurance from experts who can spot the difference between technically correct and culturally resonant.

Iterative refinement that maintains creative standards while enabling rapid testing and optimization.

The result is marketing that feels both distinctively human and impossibly efficient—because it combines the best of human creative judgment with AI operational capabilities.

The Future Belongs to Creative Curators

As AI continues to democratize technical skills, the most successful marketing professionals will be those who excel at creative curation and strategic vision. These are the leaders who can:

• Sense cultural shifts before they show up in data

• Maintain brand integrity across rapidly evolving channels and formats

• Balance creativity with performance in ways that feel authentic, not forced

• Direct AI tools toward outputs that advance strategic objectives rather than just hitting metrics

The old resume showcased what you could do. The new resume showcases what you choose to do—and why those choices drive results.

This isn't about becoming anti-technology or romantic about "human creativity." It's about recognizing that in a world where anyone can execute, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can envision, curate, and direct creative work that truly connects with audiences.

The future belongs to the tastemakers.

Want to see how taste and AI execution combine?

Discover how Averi amplifies creative judgment with expert-guided AI workflows →