Why Taste Means Taking a Position You Will Defend

When AI makes analysis nearly free, the scarce thing is a person standing behind a recommendation.

If you do analytical work for a living, you have probably felt the floor move in the last year. The tools got good. A modest extrapolation of the trendlines says the analytical output you produce, the memos and summaries and models, is about to become voluminous and nearly free. The reflex response is to ask where that leaves you, and the comforting answer everyone reaches for is “taste.” Taste will matter more when the machines can write. Judgment will be the moat.

Taste will matter more when the machines can write. Judgment will be the moat.

I believe that is right. I also think most people mean something too soft by it. Taste is not a feel for clean prose or a nose for the elegant chart. Taste is the willingness to take a position and stand behind it long enough for someone to attack it. That is the thing that does not get cheaper. That is the thing organizations will pay more for, not less.

I have been building AI into my own workflow for months. Dictation changed the first mile, from thought to draft. AI-assisted editing changed the second. Together they shifted my production function. I can produce far more written work from the same amount of attention than I could a year ago.

So can everyone else.

If every analyst, strategist, PM, consultant, and executive can generate more drafts and more arguments, the world fills up with output. More memos, more dashboards, more plausible-looking arguments, more things that look finished because they are polished. It does not fill up with better decisions.

The constraint moves. Output bandwidth expanded. Input bandwidth did not. Reading still takes time. Absorbing an argument still takes attention. Deciding whether something is worth acting on still requires a person. AI widens the pipe coming out far faster than it widens the pipe going in, and that asymmetry is where the value relocates. What deserves attention. What should be done with it. Who is willing to sign their name to the recommendation.

This is where taste actually lives, and it is harder than the comfortable version.

A summary can be complete and leave everyone exactly where they started. A position points somewhere. It says, given what we know, do this. Or wait. Or this risk matters more than that one. Or this is the tradeoff we should accept.

That move is what makes analysis useful inside an organization. A position is specific enough to be challenged, grounded enough to be defended, and concrete enough that someone can disagree with it productively. A good position gives other people something to push back on. The pushback is the point. It surfaces the missing context, the hidden constraint, the better option, the place where the argument was weaker than it looked.

A lot of my year has been spent in rooms where positions get tested. Roadshows where the idea gets challenged and dinners where guests come at power and the energy transition from a different angles. AI helps me prep faster than I could have a year ago. It pulls background, surfaces prior positions, stitches together data I would have spent days gathering. That is the cheap part. What it cannot do is tell me which theme deserves to lead in each room. The same analysis lands differently with a long-duration investor than with someone running a trading book. The position I carry into a meeting is not the model’s output. It is what I am willing to defend, calibrated to who is across the table. The work product is not the deck. It is the set of positions that survive contact with people who have skin in the game.

The position I carry into a meeting is not the model’s output. It is what I am willing to defend, calibrated to who is across the table.

So what does taste actually decide? Three things have to attach to the analysis before it is worth anything. Judgment, context, accountability.

Judgment selects from the expanded possibility space. This is the part people point at when they say taste, and they are half right. Knowing when a sentence sounds good and says very little. Knowing when a model is precise around the wrong question. Knowing when a caveat is real and when it is throat-clearing.

Context shapes the surviving candidate into something that fits a specific room. Some of it is explicit: budget, operator, risk tolerance. Some of it is social: who got burned last cycle, which objection is real, which concern is performative, when the room is ready to hear the answer. AI can produce situated analysis if you hand it the situation. It cannot read the room.

Accountability is the part the soft version of taste leaves out, and the part that matters most. A recommendation can be handed off. A position has a person standing behind the reasoning long enough for it to be tested. That does not require certainty. It requires conviction strong enough to defend and humility honest enough to update. The sentence that matters is, “This is the best answer I can defend, given what we know and what we are trying to do.” AI can produce the reasoning behind it. Accountability still has to attach to a person.

If I am right about this, the analysts and firms that treat AI as an output multiplier are going to drown in their own polished noise. The ones that treat it as a position-generation system are the ones organizations will actually listen to. The work product is the quality of the positions someone is willing to defend, the speed at which they update them under pressure, and the track record of carrying them into rooms where decisions get made.

The work product is the quality of the positions someone is willing to defend, the speed at which they update them under pressure, and the track record of carrying them into rooms where decisions get made.

That is what taste is when output is free. Taste is the willingness to be wrong in public, on the record, with your name attached. The product is a position, because a position is the form analysis takes when it is ready to move.

Comments, questions or things I missed? Send me a note (or hit reply) - I would love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!