Taste Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

The director who has genuine taste—who can recognize quality work in a domain faster than they can articulate why—will consistently produce better results from the same AI than the director who doesn't. They'll know what prompts to use, what kinds of output to ask for, how to recognize when the AI is hallucinating or missing something important. They'll know what to keep and what to discard. They'll know what the system can't do and what needs human input.

Give two equally intelligent people access to the same AI tools. One has developed taste through years of paying attention to excellent work in the domain. The other hasn't—they're operating from opinion and preference and intuition. The first will produce noticeably better results. Not because they have a better intuition about how to work with AI, but because they have a better intuition about what quality looks like. That taste—recognizing good work faster than you can explain it—doesn't disappear when the tool changes. It becomes more valuable.

The same applies to judgment. The manager whose judgment is sound will deploy AI in ways that compound: thoughtful about which tasks to automate, honest about the gaps, willing to iterate when something isn't working. The manager whose judgment is poor will just automate their existing mistakes faster. Bad judgment plus powerful tools produces bad results at scale. Good judgment plus powerful tools produces exceptional results.

This is uncomfortable for a lot of organizations because it suggests that the path forward isn't technical—isn't just about adopting the latest AI tools, building the right infrastructure, hiring the smartest engineers. Those things matter. But what matters more is developing the judgment and taste of the people directing the work. And developing those qualities is slower and less obviously productive than adopting a new tool.