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Like a marketer's "taste" for good branding, an ops professional has "taste" for designing an elegant process, a good user experience for reps, or the best automation architecture. This nuanced, judicious expertise is critical for guiding AI, which can execute tasks but can't yet determine the *best* way to do them.
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When every company has access to the same powerful AI tools, the competitive advantage is no longer budget or technology. The real differentiator becomes human taste, judgment, and the ability to apply a unique point of view to guide the AI, separating average, generic output from exceptional work.
With AI agents automating raw code generation, an engineer's role is evolving beyond pure implementation. To stay valuable, engineers must now cultivate a deep understanding of business context and product taste to know *what* to build and *why*, not just *how*.
The role of a marketer is shifting from executing tactical tasks, like "bossing around a chatbot," to designing automated systems. This involves architecting complex experiences, such as 24/7 personalization, that AI can deliver at a scale humans cannot.
Most AI tools focus on automation, which often produces more average, noisy content. The superior approach is augmentation—designing AI to enhance a marketer's abilities and produce exceptional, not average, work. This shifts the goal from creating "more" to creating "better."
Don't assume AI can effectively perform a task that doesn't already have a well-defined standard operating procedure (SOP). The best use of AI is to infuse efficiency into individual steps of an existing, successful manual process, rather than expecting it to complete the entire process on its own.
As AI commoditizes the 'how' of building products, the most critical human skills become the 'what' and 'why.' Product sense (knowing ingredients for a great product) and product taste (discerning what’s missing) will become far more valuable than process management.
AI can accelerate development, marketing, and sales tasks. However, it currently lacks the strategic judgment, customer empathy, and "taste" required for strong product management—deciding what to build and why.
To avoid generic, creatively lazy AI output ("slop"), Atlassian's Sharif Mansour injects three key ingredients: the team's unique "taste" (style/opinion), specific organizational "knowledge" (data and context), and structured "workflow" (deployment in a process). This moves beyond simple prompting to create differentiated results.
AI can execute the operational 'grunt work' of a company, but it lacks the nuanced understanding of human desires. A human founder's intuition is still the key to effective marketing, branding, and identifying what resonates with customers in a world where humans control the wallets.
Counterintuitively, as AI handles the mechanical aspects of content creation, the value of human skills like judgment, taste, and strategic insight skyrockets. AI frees marketers from menial tasks, allowing them to focus on the essential work of ensuring creative is authentic and emotionally resonant, which becomes the key differentiator.