When Tools Are Smart Enough, All That’s Left Is Taste

By Andrew Long, SEO developer

Since 2022, we’ve heard every prediction about how many jobs AI is going to eliminate and which industries are next in line to die. That conversation is exhausted.

This is a different perspective.

The tools are good. Anyone within an agency who tells you otherwise isn’t using them or doesn’t know how. Every generation has had a version of this moment: a tool arrives, access explodes, and popularity skyrockets. What emerges from the noise isn’t the best tool user but the person with the clearest perspective—the taste maker. 

Steve Jobs didn't invent the smartphone. He decided what it should feel like to use one and removed everything that got in the way of that. He walked into a moment where the tool was already available to everyone and owned it through taste alone. 

These days the tool is AI. The same revolutionary change in output and perspective is happening in agencies across the country. The question hasn’t changed: Who’s looking through it carefully enough to know what it’s actually for?

The Brief Is Never Really the Brief

Any developer or creative who has worked with clients long enough knows that what a client asks for and what a client actually needs are often two different things. They'll ask for a website redesign when they need a clearer value proposition. They'll ask for more content when they need better content about fewer things they have authority on.

A good agency takes the brief and executes. A great agency interrogates it. The work of figuring out what someone actually requires and then convincing them of it is the most important part of the job. Thus has it always been.

No tool does this. Not because tools aren't sophisticated enough yet but because this particular skill isn't about processing information. It's about judgment. It's about having seen enough situations, made enough mistakes, and worked with enough clients to recognize the shape of a problem before it fully reveals itself further along in the project.

What Taste Actually Is

Taste gets talked about like it’s a personality trait. It’s something you either have or you don’t—some ineffable quality that certain creative people are born with. It isn’t. 

Taste is a developed skill. It’s the product of paying attention to the details for a period of time. It’s knowing why something works, not just that it does. It’s the ability to look at ten executions of an idea and know which one is right without being able to fully articulate why in the moment. Client pushback is the test of this. 

Taste shows up in what you exclude as much as it does in what you include. The photographer who knows when to put the camera down. The developer who knows which of three workable solutions actually fits the use case. The copywriter who cut the sentence that everyone else in the room loved. They know something the rest of the room doesn’t because they’ve seen enough, failed enough, and worked enough.

This is what doesn’t show up in job listings. You can list tools, platforms, years of experience, and areas of specialization. You can't list taste. It's the difference between work that genuinely moves people and work that simply clears the bar. 

The Uncomfortable Conversation Is the Product

The commoditization argument against smaller agencies goes like this: Big agencies have more resources, in-house teams have more context, and now AI tools can produce at scale what used to require a room full of people. So, where does the smaller agency fit in?

The answer isn’t to compete on output. You likely won’t win. You’d be better served focusing on judgment. 

An agency's advantage has always been access. The clients get the senior people, not the junior team that the senior teams supervise. They get someone who is genuinely invested in the outcome, not managing a portfolio of fifty accounts. They get a partner who will tell them the truth about their marketing rather than protect a retainer.

AI (when used properly) can help make the output layer cheaper for everyone. It doesn’t replicate the relationship, the context, or the willingness to have the uncomfortable conversations. Those things scale with trust, not tools. 

The shops that are going to struggle are the ones whose primary value proposition was execution…the ones who won business by promising more deliverables, faster turnaround, and lower cost. That’s a race to the bottom, especially now that everyone has access to these tools. The shops that will hold ground are the ones whose value is upstream execution. Strategy, direction, and taste. The ability to look at a client’s situation and see something they don’t.

What This Demands

None of this is an argument for complacency. You have to hire for taste, which is harder than hiring for a tools list. You have to create conditions where it can develop, where people have enough exposure to great work, enough autonomy to develop a perspective, and enough psychological safety to push back when something isn’t right. 

You also have to use the tools. Not because it proves you’re current, but because people who understand what AI can and can’t do are the ones best positioned to know where human judgment still matters. Ignoring the tools doesn’t preserve your value. It just makes you slower.

The creative industry and software industry aren’t dying. But the version of it that was just selling execution is. What survives is the part that was always hardest to explain in a proposal. The part where someone with enough experience and enough care looks at a problem and knows what it actually needs.

Taste has always been the job. Tools just make it obvious.